Biblio

Container security has received much research attention recently. Previous work has proposed to apply various machine learning techniques to detect security attacks in containerized applications. On one hand, supervised machine learning schemes require sufficient labelled training data to achieve good attack detection accuracy. On the other hand, unsupervised machine learning methods are more practical by avoiding training data labelling requirements, but they often suffer from high false alarm rates. In this paper, we present SHIL, a self-supervised hybrid learning solution, which combines unsupervised and supervised learning methods to achieve high accuracy without requiring any manual data labelling. We have implemented a prototype of SHIL and conducted experiments over 41 real world security attacks in 28 commonly used server applications. Our experimental results show that SHIL can reduce false alarms by 39-91% compared to existing supervised or unsupervised machine learning schemes while achieving a higher or similar detection rate.

Containers have become increasingly popular for deploying applications in cloud computing infrastructures. However, recent studies have shown that containers are prone to various security attacks. In this paper, we conduct a study on the effectiveness of various vulnerability detection schemes for containers. Specifically, we implement and evaluate a set of static and dynamic vulnerability attack detection schemes using 28 real world vulnerability exploits that widely exist in docker images. Our results show that the static vulnerability scanning scheme only detects 3 out of 28 tested vulnerabilities and dynamic anomaly detection schemes detect 22 vulnerability exploits. Combining static and dynamic schemes can further improve the detection rate to 86% (i.e., 24 out of 28 exploits). We also observe that the dynamic anomaly detection scheme can achieve more than 20 seconds lead time (i.e., a time window before attacks succeed) for a group of commonly seen attacks in containers that try to gain a shell and execute arbitrary code.

Cloud server systems such as Hadoop and Cassandra have enabled many real-world data-intensive applications running inside computing clouds. However, those systems present many data-corruption and performance problems which are notoriously difficult to debug due to the lack of diagnosis information. In this paper, we present DScope, a tool that statically detects data-corruption related software hang bugs in cloud server systems. DScope statically analyzes I/O operations and loops in a software package, and identifies loops whose exit conditions can be affected by I/O operations through returned data, returned error code, or I/O exception handling. After identifying those loops which are prone to hang problems under data corruption, DScope conducts loop bound and loop stride analysis to prune out false positives. We have implemented DScope and evaluated it using 9 common cloud server systems. Our results show that DScope can detect 42 real software hang bugs including 29 newly discovered software hang bugs. In contrast, existing bug detection tools miss detecting most of those bugs.