Biblio

The growing complexity and diversification of cyber-attacks are largely reflected in the increasing sophistication of security appliances, which are often too cumbersome to be run in virtual services and IoT devices. Hence, the design of cyber-security frameworks is today looking at more cooperative models, which collect security-related data from a large set of heterogeneous sources for centralized analysis and correlation.In this paper, we outline a flexible abstraction layer for access to security context. It is conceived to program and gather data from lightweight inspection and enforcement hooks deployed in cloud applications and IoT devices. We also provide a preliminary description of its implementation, by reviewing the main software components and their role.

The uptake of virtualization and cloud technologies has pushed novel development and operation models for the software, bringing more agility and automation. Unfortunately, cyber-security paradigms have not evolved at the same pace and are not yet able to effectively tackle the progressive disappearing of a sharp security perimeter. In this paper, we describe a novel cyber-security architecture for cloud-based distributed applications and network services. We propose a security orchestrator that controls pervasive, lightweight, and programmable security hooks embedded in the virtual functions that compose the cloud application, pursuing better visibility and more automation in this domain. Our approach improves existing management practice for service orchestration, by decoupling the management of the business logic from that of security. We also describe the current implementation stage for a programmable monitoring, inspection, and enforcement framework, which represents the ground technology for the realization of the whole architecture.