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2019 | Buch

Cloud Security Auditing

verfasst von: Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Prof. Mourad Debbabi

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Advances in Information Security

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Über dieses Buch

This book provides a comprehensive review of the most up to date research related to cloud security auditing and discusses auditing the cloud infrastructure from the structural point of view, while focusing on virtualization-related security properties and consistency between multiple control layers. It presents an off-line automated framework for auditing consistent isolation between virtual networks in OpenStack-managed cloud spanning over overlay and layer 2 by considering both cloud layers’ views. A runtime security auditing framework for the cloud with special focus on the user-level including common access control and authentication mechanisms e.g., RBAC, ABAC and SSO is covered as well.
This book also discusses a learning-based proactive security auditing system, which extracts probabilistic dependencies between runtime events and applies such dependencies to proactively audit and prevent security violations resulting from critical events. Finally, this book elaborates the design and implementation of a middleware as a pluggable interface to OpenStack for intercepting and verifying the legitimacy of user requests at runtime.
Many companies nowadays leverage cloud services for conducting major business operations (e.g., Web service, inventory management, customer service, etc.). However, the fear of losing control and governance still persists due to the inherent lack of transparency and trust in clouds. The complex design and implementation of cloud infrastructures may cause numerous vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, while the unique properties of clouds (elastic, self-service, multi-tenancy) can bring novel security challenges. In this book, the authors discuss how state-of-the-art security auditing solutions may help increase cloud tenants’ trust in the service providers by providing assurance on the compliance with the applicable laws, regulations, policies, and standards. This book introduces the latest research results on both traditional retroactive auditing and novel (runtime and proactive) auditing techniques to serve different stakeholders in the cloud. This book covers security threats from different cloud abstraction levels and discusses a wide-range of security properties related to cloud-specific standards (e.g., Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) and ISO 27017). It also elaborates on the integration of security auditing solutions into real world cloud management platforms (e.g., OpenStack, Amazon AWS and Google GCP).
This book targets industrial scientists, who are working on cloud or security-related topics, as well as security practitioners, administrators, cloud providers and operators.Researchers and advanced-level students studying and working in computer science, practically in cloud security will also be interested in this book.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
Cloud computing has been gaining momentum as a promising IT solution specially for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, and on-demand accesses to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Businesses of all sizes nowadays leverage cloud services for conducting their major operations (e.g., web service, inventory management, customer service, etc.). Based on the way services are provided, cloud computing has been divided into different categories such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). In most of these categories, there exist at least three main stakeholders: cloud service providers, tenants and their users. A cloud service provider owns a significant amount of computational resources, e.g., servers, storage, and networking, and offers different paid services (e.g., IaaS, PaaS, etc.) to its customers by utilizing this pool of resources. Usually, cloud tenants are different companies or departments within a company. A tenant, the direct customer of cloud providers, enjoys the ad hoc and elastic (i.e., allocating/deprovisioning based on demands) nature of cloud in utilizing the shared pool of resources for conducting its necessary operations. As a member of a cloud tenant, a user mainly avails different services offered by a tenant. Thus, by providing a dynamic (i.e., ever changing) and a measured service (i.e., “pay as you go”) to its users and tenants, cloud computing has become a popular choice for diverse business models in recent years.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 2. Literature Review
Abstract
This chapter first categorizes the existing cloud security auditing, then elaborates each category mainly based on its coverage and adopted verification techniques, and finally presents a taxonomy based on these works. There exist mainly three categories of cloud security auditing approaches. In the following, we discuss each of these approaches with corresponding example works.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 3. Auditing Security Compliance of the Virtualized Infrastructure
Abstract
This chapter presents a security auditing approach for the cloud virtualized environment. More precisely, we focus primarily on virtual resources isolation based on structural properties (e.g., assignment of instances to physical hosts and the proper configuration of virtualization mechanisms), and consistency of the configurations in different layers of the cloud (infrastructure management layer, software-defined networking (SDN) controller layer, virtual layer, and physical layer). Although there already exist various efforts on cloud auditing (as shown in Chap. 2), to the best of our knowledge, none has facilitated automated auditing of structural settings of the virtual resources while taking into account the multi-layer aspects.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 4. Auditing Virtual Network Isolation Across Cloud Layers
Abstract
In this chapter, taking into account the complexity factor and multi-layered nature of the cloud, we present an automated cross-layer approach that tackles the above issues for auditing isolation requirements between virtual networks in a multi-tenant cloud. We focus on isolation at layer 2 virtual networks and overlay, namely topology isolation, which is the basic building block for network communication and segregation for upper network layers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort on auditing cloud infrastructure isolation at layer 2 virtual networks and overlay taking into account cross-layer consistency in the cloud stack.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 5. User-Level Runtime Security Auditing for the Cloud
Abstract
In this chapter, we present an efficient user-level runtime security auditing framework in a multi-domain cloud environment. The multi-tenancy and ever-changing nature of clouds usually implies significant design and operational complexity, which may prepare the floor for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities leading to violations of security properties. Runtime security auditing may increase cloud tenants’ trust in the service providers by providing assurance on the compliance with security properties mainly derived from the applicable laws, regulations, policies, and standards. Evidently, the Cloud Security Alliance has recently introduced the Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) for security assurance in clouds, which defines three levels of certifications (self-auditing, third-party auditing, and continuous, near real-time verification of security compliance).
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 6. Proactive Security Auditing in Clouds
Abstract
In this chapter, we present an automated learning-based proactive auditing system, namely LeaPS, which automatically learns probabilistic dependencies, and hence, addresses the inefficiencies of existing solutions. To this end, we describe a log processor, which processes (as discussed later) real-world cloud logs and prepares them for different learning techniques (e.g., Bayesian network and sequence pattern mining) to allow capturing dependency relationships. Unlike most learning-based security solutions, since we are not relying on learning techniques to detect abnormal behaviors, we avoid the well-known limitations of high false positive rates; any inaccuracy in the learning phase would only affect the efficiency, as will be demonstrated through experiments later in this chapter. We believe this idea of leveraging learning for efficiency, instead of security, may be adapted to benefit other security solutions. As demonstrated by our implementation and experimental results, LeaPS provides an automated, efficient, and scalable solution for different cloud platforms to increase their transparency and accountability to tenants.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 7. Runtime Security Policy Enforcement in Clouds
Abstract
In this chapter, we explain the design and implementation of a middleware, namely PERMON, to apply the proactive approach to OpenStack (OpenStack open-source cloud computing software (2015). http://​www.​openstack.​org. Accessed 14 Feb, 2018), which is one of the most popular cloud platforms. The middleware is designed to intercept the attributes of user-issued requests on their path to an intended API service, and identify the requested event types based on the examined attributes. Having processed the selected parameters coupled with the identified event types, the middleware enforces the verification result by either granting or rejecting the user request.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Chapter 8. Conclusion
Abstract
The ever-changing and self-service nature of clouds bring the necessity to audit the cloud to ensure security compliance, which is essential for cloud providers’ accountability and transparency towards their tenants. To this end, there exist three types of cloud-specific security auditing approaches: retroactive, intercept-and-check, and proactive. However, the existing works under these approaches suffer from various limitations such as failing to bridge the high-level security properties and low-level cloud configurations and logs, provide a practical response time due to the sheer scale of the cloud, or requiring manual inputs from the users which may be impractical in most cloud environments. In summary, there is a need of an automated security auditing process which can potentially overcome all these limitations.
Suryadipta Majumdar, Taous Madi, Yushun Wang, Azadeh Tabiban, Momen Oqaily, Amir Alimohammadifar, Yosr Jarraya, Makan Pourzandi, Lingyu Wang, Mourad Debbabi
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Cloud Security Auditing
verfasst von
Suryadipta Majumdar
Taous Madi
Yushun Wang
Azadeh Tabiban
Momen Oqaily
Amir Alimohammadifar
Yosr Jarraya
Makan Pourzandi
Lingyu Wang
Prof. Mourad Debbabi
Copyright-Jahr
2019
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-23128-6
Print ISBN
978-3-030-23127-9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23128-6