Biblio

In the area of cloud security, detection of DDoS attack is a challenging task such that legitimate users use the cloud resources properly. So in this paper, detection and classification of the attacking packets and normal packets are done by using various machine learning classifiers. We have selected the most relevant features from NSL KDD dataset using five (Information gain, gain ratio, chi-squared, ReliefF, and symmetrical uncertainty) commonly used feature selection methods. Now from the entire selected feature set, the most important features are selected by applying our hybrid feature selection method. Since all the anomalous instances of the dataset do not belong to DDoS category so we have separated only the DDoS packets from the dataset using the selected features. Finally, the dataset has been prepared and named as KDD DDoS dataset by considering the selected DDoS packets and normal packets. This KDD DDoS dataset has been discretized using discretize tool in weka for getting better performance. Finally, this discretize dataset has been applied on some commonly used (Naive Bayes, Bayes Net, Decision Table, J48 and Random Forest) classifiers for determining the detection rate of the classifiers. 10 fold cross validation has been used here for measuring the robustness of the system. To measure the efficiency of our hybrid feature selection method, we have also applied the same set of classifiers on the NSL KDD dataset, where it gives the best anomaly detection rate of 99.72% and average detection rate 98.47% similarly, we have applied the same set of classifiers on NSL DDoS dataset and obtain the average DDoS detection of 99.01% and the best DDoS detection rate of 99.86%. In order to compare the performance of our proposed hybrid method, we have also applied the existing feature selection methods and measured the detection rate using the same set of classifiers. Finally, we have seen that our hybrid approach for detecting the DDoS attack gives the best detection rate compared to some existing methods.

Cipher Text Policy Attribute Based Encryption which is a form of Public Key Encryption has become a renowned approach as a Data access control scheme for data security and confidentiality. It not only provides the flexibility and scalability in the access control mechanisms but also enhances security by fuzzy fined-grained access control. However, schemes are there which for more security increases the key size which ultimately leads to high encryption and decryption time. Also, there is no provision for handling the middle man attacks during data transfer. In this paper, a light-weight and more scalable encryption mechanism is provided which not only uses fewer resources for encoding and decoding but also improves the security along with faster encryption and decryption time. Moreover, this scheme provides an efficient key sharing mechanism for providing secure transfer to avoid any man-in-the-middle attacks. Also, due to fuzzy policies inclusion, chances are there to get approximation of user attributes available which makes the process fast and reliable and improves the performance of legitimate users.

Evaluating user behavior in cloud computing infrastructure is important for both Cloud Users and Cloud Service Providers. The service providers must ensure the safety of users who access the cloud. User behavior can be modeled and employed to help assess trust and play a role in ensuring authenticity and safety of the user. In this paper, we propose a User Behavior Trust Model based on Fuzzy Logic (UBTMFL). In this model, we develop user history patterns and compare them current user behavior. The outcome of the comparison is sent to a trust computation center to calculate a user trust value. This model considers three types of trust: direct, history and comprehensive. Simulation results are included.

At present, cloud computing technology has made outstanding contributions to the Internet in data unification and sharing applications. However, the problem of information security in cloud computing environment has to be paid attention to and effective measures have to be taken to solve it. In order to control the data security under cloud services, the DS evidence theory method is introduced. The trust management mechanism is established from the source of big data, and a cloud computing security assessment model is constructed to achieve the quantifiable analysis purpose of cloud computing security assessment. Through the simulation, the innovative way of quantifying the confidence criterion through big data trust management and DS evidence theory not only regulates the data credible quantification mechanism under cloud computing, but also improves the effectiveness of cloud computing security assessment, providing a friendly service support platform for subsequent cloud computing service.

To solve the problem of big data security and privacy protection, and expound the concept of cloud computing, big data and the relationship between them, the existing security and privacy protection method characteristic and problems were studied. A reference model is proposed which is based on cloud platform. In this model the physical level, data layer, interface layer and application layer step by step in to implement the system security risk early warning and threat perception, this provides an effective solution for the research of big data security. At the same time, a future research direction that uses the blockchain to solve cloud security and privacy protection is also pointed out.

Cloud computing is a new promising technology paradigm that can provide clients from the whole network with scalable storage resources and on-demand high-quality services. However, security concerns are raised when sensitive data are outsourced. Searchable encryption is a kind of cryptographic primitive that enables clients to selectively retrieve encrypted data, the existing schemes that support for sub-linear boolean queries are only considered in symmetric key setting, which makes a limitation for being widely deployed in many cloud applications. In order to address this issue, we propose a novel searchable asymmetric encryption scheme to support for sub-linear boolean query over encrypted data in a multi-client model that is extracted from an important observation that the outsourced database in cloud is continuously contributed and searched by multiple clients. For the purpose of introducing the scheme, we combine both the ideas of symmetric searchable encryption and public key searchable encryption and then design a novel secure inverted index. Furthermore, a detailed security analysis for our scheme is given under the simulation-based security definition. Finally, we conduct experiments for our construction on a real dataset (Enron) along with a performance analysis to show its practicality.

The unprecedented and enormous growth of cloud computing, especially online social networks, has resulted in numerous incidents of the loss of users' privacy. In this paper, we provide a framework, based on our anti-data-mining (ADM) principle, to enhance users' privacy against adversaries including: online social networks; search engines; financial terminal providers; ad networks; eavesdropping governments; and other parties who can monitor users' content from the point where the content leaves users' computers to within the data centers of these information accumulators. To achieve this goal, our framework proactively uses the principles of suppression of sensitive data and disinformation. Moreover, we use social-bots in a novel way for enhanced privacy and provide users' with plausible deniability for their photos, audio, and video content uploaded online.

This work presents ChainFS, a middleware system that secures cloud storage services using a minimally trusted Blockchain. ChainFS hardens the cloud-storage security against forking attacks. The ChainFS middleware exposes a file-system interface to end users. Internally, ChainFS stores data files in the cloud and exports minimal and necessary functionalities to the Blockchain for key distribution and file operation logging. We implement the ChainFS system on Ethereum and S3FS and closely integrate it with FUSE clients and Amazon S3 cloud storage. We measure the system performance and demonstrate low overhead.

Through time inference attacks, adversaries fingerprint SDN controllers, estimate switches flow-table size, and perform flow state reconnaissance. In fact, timing a SDN and analyzing its results can expose information which later empowers SDN resource-consumption or saturation attacks. In the real world, however, launching such attacks is not easy. This is due to some challenges attackers may encounter while attacking an actual SDN deployment. These challenges, which are not addressed adequately in the related literature, are investigated in this paper. Accordingly, practical solutions to mitigate such attacks are also proposed. Discussed challenges are clarified by means of conducting extensive experiments on an actual cloud data center testbed. Moreover, mitigation schemes have been implemented and examined in details. Experimental results show that proposed countermeasures effectively block time inference attacks.

To ensure the accountability of a cloud environment, security policies may be provided as a set of properties to be enforced by cloud providers. However, due to the sheer size of clouds, it can be challenging to provide timely responses to all the requests coming from cloud users at runtime. In this paper, we design and implement a middleware, PERMON, as a pluggable interface to OpenStack for intercepting and verifying the legitimacy of user requests at runtime, while leveraging our previous work on proactive security verification to improve the efficiency. We describe detailed implementation of the middleware and demonstrate its usefulness through a use case.

Pervasive systems over the years continuous to grow exponentially. Engagement of IoT in fields such as Agriculture, Home automation, industrial applications etc is on the rise. Self organizing networks within the IoT field give rise to engagement of various nodes for data communication. The rise in Cyber-attacks within IoT pose a lot of threat to these connected nodes and hence there is a need for data passing through nodes to be verified during communication. In this paper we proposed a nodal authentication approach in IoT using blockchain in securing the integrity of data passing through the nodes in IoT. In our work, we engaged the GOST algorithm in our approach. At the end, we achieved a nodal authentication and verification of the transmitted data. This makes it very difficult for an attacker to fake a node in the communication chain of the connected nodes. Data integrity was achieved in the nodes during the communication.

Phishing is typically deployed as an attack vector in the initial stages of a hacking endeavour. Due to it low-risk rightreward nature it has seen a widespread adoption, and detecting it has become a challenge in recent times. This paper proposes a novel means of detecting phishing websites using a Generative Adversarial Network. Taking into account the internal structure and external metadata of a website, the proposed approach uses a generator network which generates both legitimate as well as synthetic phishing features to train a discriminator network. The latter then determines if the features are either normal or phishing websites, before improving its detection accuracy based on the classification error. The proposed approach is evaluated using two different phishing datasets and is found to achieve a detection accuracy of up to 94%.

A lot of organizations need effective resolutions to record and evaluate the existing enormous volume of information. Cloud computing as a facilitator offers scalable resources and noteworthy economic assistances as the decreased operational expenditures. This model increases a wide set of security and privacy problems that have to be taken into reflexion. Multi-occupancy, loss of control, and confidence are the key issues in cloud computing situations. This paper considers the present know-hows and a comprehensive assortment of both previous and high-tech tasks on cloud security and confidentiality. The paradigm shift that supplements the usage of cloud computing is progressively enabling augmentation to safety and privacy contemplations linked with the different facades of cloud computing like multi-tenancy, reliance, loss of control and responsibility. So, cloud platforms that deal with big data that have sensitive information are necessary to use technical methods and structural precautions to circumvent data defence failures that might lead to vast and costly harms.

Recent studies have shown that co-resident attacks have aroused great security threat in cloud. Since hardware is shared among different tenants, malicious tenants can launch various co-resident attacks, such as side channel attacks, covert channel attacks and resource interference attacks. Existing countermeasures have their limitations and can not provide comprehensive defense against co-resident attacks. This paper combines the advantages of various countermeasures and proposes a complete co-resident threat defense solution which consists of co-resident-resistant VM allocation (CRRVA), analytic hierarchy process-based threat score mechanism (AHPTSM) and attack-aware VM reallocation (AAVR). CRRVA securely allocates VMs and also takes load balance and power consumption into consideration to make the allocation policy more practical. According to the intrinsic characteristics of co-resident attacks, AHPTSM evaluates VM's threat score which denotes the probability that a VM is suffering or conducting co-resident attacks based on analytic hierarchy process. And AAVR further migrates VMs with extremely high threat scores and separates VM pairs which are likely to be malicious to each other. Extensive experiments in CloudSim have shown that CRRVA can greatly reduce the allocation co-resident threat as well as balancing the load for both CSPs and tenants with little impact on power consumption. In addition, guided by threat score distribution, AAVR can effectively guarantee runtime co-resident security by migrating high threat score VMs with less migration cost.

Cloud storage offers a considerable efficiency and security to the user's data and provide high flexibility to the user. The hackers make attempt of several attacks to steal the data that increase the concern of data security in cloud. The Third Party Auditing (TPA) method is introduced to check the data integrity. There are several TPA methods developed to improve the privacy and efficiency of the data integrity checking method. Various methods involved in TPA, have been analyzed in this review in terms of function, security and overall performance. Merkel Hash Tree (MHT) method provides efficiency and security in checking the integrity of data. The computational overhead of the proof verify is also analyzed in this review. The communication cost of the most TPA methods observed as low and there is a need of improvement in security of the public auditing.

Runtime cloud security auditing plays a vital role in mitigating security concerns in a cloud. However, there currently does not exist a comprehensive solution that can protect a cloud tenant against the threats rendered from the multiple levels (e.g., user, virtual, and physical) of the cloud design. Furthermore, most of the existing solutions suffer from slow response time and require significant manual efforts. Therefore, a simple integration of the existing solutions for different levels is not a practical solution. In this paper, we propose a multilevel proactive security auditing system, which overcomes all the above-mentioned limitations. To this end, our main idea is to automatically build a predictive model based on the dependency relationships between cloud events, proactively verify the security policies related to different levels of a cloud by leveraging this model, and finally enforce those policies on the cloud based on the verification results. Our experiments using both synthetic and real data show the practicality and effectiveness of this solution (e.g., responding in a few milliseconds to verify each level of the cloud).

We initiate an effort to provide a rigorous, holistic and modular security analysis of OpenStack. OpenStack is the prevalent open-source, non-proprietary package for managing cloud services and data centers. It is highly complex and consists of multiple inter-related components which are developed by separate, loosely coordinated groups. All of these properties make the security analysis of OpenStack both a worthy mission and a challenging one. We base our modeling and security analysis in the universally composable (UC) security framework. This allows specifying and proving security in a modular way – a crucial feature when analyzing systems of such magnitude. Our analysis has the following key features: 1) It is user-centric: It stresses the security guarantees given to users of the system in terms of privacy, correctness, and timeliness of the services. 2) It considers the security of OpenStack even when some of the components are compromised. This departs from the traditional design approach of OpenStack, which assumes that all services are fully trusted. 3) It is modular: It formulates security properties for individual components and uses them to prove security properties of the overall system. Specifically, this work concentrates on the high-level structure of OpenStack, leaving the further formalization and more detailed analysis of specific OpenStack services to future work. Specifically, we formulate ideal functionalities that correspond to some of the core OpenStack modules, and then proves security of the overall OpenStack protocol given the ideal components. As demonstrated within, the main challenge in the high-level design is to provide adequately fine-grained scoping of permissions to access dynamically changing system resources. We demonstrate security issues with current mechanisms in case of failure of some components, propose alternative mechanisms, and rigorously prove adequacy of then new mechanisms within our modeling.

Cloud computing, cloud security and cloud storage have been gradually introduced into people's life and become hot topicsof research, for which relevant technologies have permeated through the computer industry and relevant industries. With the coming of the modern information society, secure storage of data has been becoming increasingly important. Proceeding from traditional policy storage, this paper includes comparison and improvement of policy storage for the purpose of meeting requirements of storage of cloud security policy. Policy storage technology refers to a technology used to realize storage of policies created by users and relevant policy information. Policy repository can conduct centralized management and processing of multiple policies and their relevant information. At present, popular policy repositories generally include policy storage for relational database or policy storage for directory server or a file in a fixed format, such as XML file format.

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.

Remote data possession is becoming an increasingly important issue in cloud storage. It enables users to verify if their outsourced data have remained intact while in cloud storage. The existing remote data audit (RDA) protocols were designed with the public key infrastructure (PKI) system. However, this incurs considerable costs when users need to frequently access data from the cloud service provider with PKI. This study proposes a protocol, called identity-based RDA (ID-RDA) that addresses this problem without the need for users’ certificates. This study outperforms existing RDA protocols in computation and communication.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) present a number of vulnerabilities, threats and risks that could lead to devastating cyber-attacks resulting into huge financial losses, legal implications, and reputational damage for large and small organizations. As such, in this digital transformation and 4th industrial revolution era, nations and organizations have accepted that cybersecurity must be part of their strategic objectives and priorities. However, cybersecurity in itself is a multifaceted problem to address and the voluntary "one-size-fits-all" cybersecurity approaches have proven not effective in dealing with cyber incidents, especially in complex operational environments (e.g. large technology-centric organizations) that are multi-disciplinary, multi-departmental, multi-role, multinational, and operating across different locations. Addressing modern cybersecurity challenges requires more than a technical solution. A contextual and systematic approach that considers the complexities of these large digital environments in order to achieve resilient, sustainable, cost-effective and proactive cybersecurity is desirable. This paper aims to highlight through a single case study approach the multifaceted nature and complexity of the cybersecurity environment, pertinently in multi-disciplinary organizations. Essentially, this paper contributes a unified cybersecurity framework underpinned by an integrated capability management (ICM) approach that addresses the multifaceted nature of cybersecurity as well as the challenges and requirements eminent in complex environments, such as national government, municipalities or large corporations. The unified framework incorporates realistic and practical guidelines to bridge the gap between cybersecurity capability requirements, governance instruments and cybersecurity capability specification, implementation, employment and sustainment drawing from well-tested military capability development approaches.

Many customers ranked cloud security as a major challenge that threaten their work and reduces their trust on cloud service's provider. Hence, a significant improvement is required to establish better adaptations of security measures that suit recent technologies and especially distributed architectures. Considering the meaningful recorded data in cloud generated log files, making analysis on them, mines insightful value about hacker's activities. It identifies malicious user behaviors and predicts new suspected events. Not only that, but centralizing log files, prevents insiders from causing damage to system. In this paper, we proposed to take away sensitive log files into a single server provider and combining both MapReduce programming and k-means on the same algorithm to cluster observed events into classes having similar features. To label unknown user behaviors and predict new suspected activities this approach considers cosine distances and deviation metrics.

Dependency on cloud computing are increasing day by day due to its beneficial aspects. As day by day we are relying on cloud computing, the securities issues are coming up. There are lots of security protocols but now-a-days those protocol are not secured enough to provide a high security. One of those protocols which were once highly secured, is Kerberos authentication protocol. With the advancement of technology, Kerberos authentication protocol is no longer as secured as it was before. Many authors have thought about the improvement of Kerberos authentication protocol and consequently they have proposed different types of protocol models by using a renowned public key cryptography named RSA cryptography. Though RSA cryptography is good to some extent but this cryptography has some flaws that make this cryptography less secured as well as less efficient. In this paper, we are combining Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as well as Threshold Cryptography to create a new version of Kerberos authentication protocol. Our proposed model will provide secure transaction of data which will not only be hard to break but also increase memory efficiency, cost efficiency, and reduce the burden of computation.

Cloud Computing is an important term of modern technology. The usefulness of Cloud is increasing day by day and simultaneously more and more security problems are arising as well. Two of the major threats of Cloud are improper authentication and multi-tenancy. According to the specialists both pros and cons belong to multi-tenancy. There are security protocols available but it is difficult to claim these protocols are perfect and ensure complete protection. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated model to ensure better Cloud security for Authentication and multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy means sharing of resources and virtualization among clients. Since multi-tenancy allows multiple users to access same resources simultaneously, there is high probability of accessing confidential data without proper privileges. Our model includes Kerberos authentication protocol to enhance authentication security. During our research on Kerberos we have found some flaws in terms of encryption method which have been mentioned in couple of IEEE conference papers. Pondering about this complication we have elected Elliptic Curve Cryptography. On the other hand, to attenuate arose risks due to multi-tenancy we are proposing a Resource Allocation Manager Unit, a Control Database and Resource Allocation Map. This part of the model will perpetuate resource allocation for the users.

Recently, cloud computing is an emerging technology along with big data. Both technologies come together. Due to the enormous size of data in big data, it is impossible to store them in local storage. Alternatively, even we want to store them locally, we have to spend much money to create bit data center. One way to save money is store big data in cloud storage service. Cloud storage service provides users space and security to store the file. However, relying on single cloud storage may cause trouble for the customer. CSP may stop its service anytime. It is too risky if data owner hosts his file only single CSP. Also, the CSP is the third party that user have to trust without verification. After deploying his file to CSP, the user does not know who access his file. Even CSP provides a security mechanism to prevent outsider attack. However, how user ensure that there is no insider attack to steal or corrupt the file. This research proposes the way to minimize the risk, ensure data privacy, also accessing control. The big data file is split into chunks and distributed to multiple cloud storage provider. Even there is insider attack; the attacker gets only part of the file. He cannot reconstruct the whole file. After splitting the file, metadata is generated. Metadata is a place to keep chunk information, includes, chunk locations, access path, username and password of data owner to connect each CSP. Asymmetric security concept is applied to this research. The metadata will be encrypted and transfer to the user who requests to access the file. The file accessing, monitoring, metadata transferring is functions of dew computing which is an intermediate server between the users and cloud service.