Biblio

Cloud Storage Brokers (CSB) provide seamless and concurrent access to multiple Cloud Storage Services (CSS) while abstracting cloud complexities from end-users. However, this multi-cloud strategy faces several security challenges including enlarged attack surfaces, malicious insider threats, security complexities due to integration of disparate components and API interoperability issues. Novel security approaches are imperative to tackle these security issues. Therefore, this paper proposes CS-BAuditor, a novel cloud security system that continuously audits CSB resources, to detect malicious activities and unauthorized changes e.g. bucket policy misconfigurations, and remediates these anomalies. The cloud state is maintained via a continuous snapshotting mechanism thereby ensuring fault tolerance. We adopt the principles of chaos engineering by integrating BrokerMonkey, a component that continuously injects failure into our reference CSB system, CloudRAID. Hence, CSBAuditor is continuously tested for efficiency i.e. its ability to detect the changes injected by BrokerMonkey. CSBAuditor employs security metrics for risk analysis by computing severity scores for detected vulnerabilities using the Common Configuration Scoring System, thereby overcoming the limitation of insufficient security metrics in existing cloud auditing schemes. CSBAuditor has been tested using various strategies including chaos engineering failure injection strategies. Our experimental evaluation validates the efficiency of our approach against the aforementioned security issues with a detection and recovery rate of over 96 %.

Cloud storage brokerage systems abstract cloud storage complexities by mediating technical and business relationships between cloud stakeholders, while providing value-added services. This however raises security challenges pertaining to the integration of disparate components with sometimes conflicting security policies and architectural complexities. Assessing the security risks of these challenges is therefore important for Cloud Storage Brokers (CSBs). In this paper, we present a threat modeling schema to analyze and identify threats and risks in cloud brokerage brokerage systems. Our threat modeling schema works by generating attack trees, attack graphs, and data flow diagrams that represent the interconnections between identified security risks. Our proof-of-concept implementation employs the Common Configuration Scoring System (CCSS) to support the threat modeling schema, since current schemes lack sufficient security metrics which are imperatives for comprehensive risk assessments. We demonstrate the efficiency of our proposal by devising CCSS base scores for two attacks commonly launched against cloud storage systems: Cloud sStorage Enumeration Attack and Cloud Storage Exploitation Attack. These metrics are then combined with CVSS based metrics to assign probabilities in an Attack Tree. Thus, we show the possibility combining CVSS and CCSS for comprehensive threat modeling, and also show that our schemas can be used to improve cloud security.