Adaptive, Model-Based Cloud Computing Security Management
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Adaptive, Model-based Cloud Computing Security Management By Mohamed Almorsy A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science 2014 Abstract The cloud computing model introduces a new paradigm shift in computing platforms with highly scalable, distributed, and shared computing resources. However, despite the potential cost savings and revenues reaped by adopting the cloud model, it still has a set of open issues that impacts its wide adoption. Security is at the top of these issues. In addition to the traditional technology-related problems, the cloud model introduces a set of new and critical security problems including loss-of-control, lack-of-trust, data isolation, and tenants’ security controls’ integration. These security problems are not mitigated yet by the existing cloud platforms. Cloud security solutions should take into consideration that it is hard to get cloud tenants and service providers to manually customize their shared cloud services’ security. Moreover, the set of a cloud service tenants usually emerges at real-time. Each service tenant usually has a set of security requirements which changes over time to reflect new risks and business objectives. In this research, we have successfully invented a new cloud computing security management platform addressing these security problems. The invented security platform depends on capturing cloud platform, services and security specification details using a set of novel system and security mega-models. Cloud stakeholders use these models to specify their assets-security requirements. Then, our platform automates the integration of these requirements within target services at runtime. Identifying security requirements that need to be satisfied requires deep experience with system and security to pinpoint possible threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks. This is even worse when adopting the cloud model where services are publicly accessible to malicious users who could exploit services’ vulnerabilities and flaws to breach tenants’ security. Our platform delivers a novel, extensible, and online signature-based security analysis service that automates services’ security analysis. The outcomes of the analysis service are feed into our security- patching component. Furthermore, given that tenants do not have direct control on their outsource shared cloud- services, our platform provides a new security monitoring service that automatically realizes tenants’ security metrics, used in assessing services’ security status, into security probes and automatically deploys, collects, and analyzes probes’ generated measurements. We evaluated each component of our platform using a set of benchmark applications. Then, we conducted three case studies using our platform in mitigating three key cloud security problems. The evaluation results are very supportive and demonstrate that our platform successfully automated the security management of the shared, multi-tenant cloud services. ii Acknowledgement I am deeply grateful to my lovely wife Amani Ibrahim, for her love, understanding, encouragement, sacrifice and help. I am also grateful for my parents for raising me up, teaching me to be a good person, and supporting me throughout my studies. I sincerely express my deepest gratitude to my coordinate supervisor, Professor John Grundy, for his supervision and continuous encouragement throughout my PhD study. Without his consistent support, I would not have been able to complete this research project. The first year was really tough and I got many rejections. He kept encouraging and supporting me until I succeed to come up with a good stuff that easily got accepted. He is indeed “a good mentor and a helpful friend”. I thank Prof. Jun Han for his sincere advices and feedback whenever I ask him for this. He is really a very helpful and supportive supervisor. Finally, I thank Swinburne University of Technology and the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies for offering me a full research scholarship throughout my doctoral program. I also thank the Research Committee of the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies for research publication funding support and for providing me with financial support to attend conferences. iii Declaration This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. Mohamed Almorsy iv List of Publications During my PhD project, I have managed to publish a bunch of peer-reviewed conference and journal papers as well as a book chapter that support our analysis, findings and contributions. [1] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy, and Amani Ibrahim, “Adaptable, model-driven security engineering for SaaS cloud-based applications”, International Journal of Automated Software Engineering, Volume 29, September 2013. [2] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy, and Amani Ibrahim, “Adaptive Security Management in SaaS Applications”, Security, Privacy and Trust in Cloud Systems, Springer. [3] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy, and Amani Ibrahim, “Automated Software Architecture Security Risk Analysis Using Formalized Signatures", 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), San Franciso, May 2013, IEEE CS Press. [4] Mohamed Almorsy, John C. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim, “MDSE@R: Model-Driven Security Engineering at Runtime”, 4th International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security (CSS 2012), Dec 12-13 2012, Melbourne, Australia. [5] Mohamed Almorsy, John C. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim, “VAM-aaS: Online Cloud Services Security Vulnerability Analysis and Mitigation-as-a-Service”, The 13th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2012), Nov 28-30 2012, Paphos, Cyprus, Springer. [6] Mohamed Almorsy, John C. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim, “Supporting Automated Vulnerability Analysis using Formalized Vulnerability Signatures", 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2012), Sept 3-7 2012, Essen, Germany, ACM Press. [7] Mohamed Almorsy, John C. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim, “Supporting Automated Software Re-Engineering Using "Re-Aspects”, 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2012), Sept 3-7 2012, Essen, Germany, ACM Press. [8] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy and Amani S. Ibrahim, “TOSSMA: A Tenant- Oriented SaaS Security Management Architecture", 5th IEEE Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2012), IEEE CS Press, Waikiki, Hawai, USA, June 24-29 2012. [9] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy and Amani S. Ibrahim, “SMURF: Supporting Multi-tenancy Using Re-Aspects Framework", 17th IEEE International Conference on v Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2012), Paris, France, July 2012, IEEE CS Press. [10] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy and Amani S. Ibrahim, “Collaboration-Based Cloud Computing Security Management Framework", In Proceedings of 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2011), Washington DC, USA on 4 – 9 July, 2011, IEEE. [11] Mohamed Almorsy, John Grundy Ingo and Mueller, “An analysis of the cloud computing security problem", In Proceedings of the 2010 Asia Pacific Cloud Workshop 2010 (co-located with APSEC2010), Sydney, Nov 30 2010. The following publications, which I am a co-author, have been published during my candidature as a part of my collaboration with colleagues in our research group. [1] Amani S. Ibrahim, John C. Grundy, James Hamlyn-Harris, Mohamed Almorsy, “DIGGER: Identifying Operating System Dynamic Kernel Objects for Run-time Security Analysis", International Journal on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems (IJIDCS). [2] Amani S. Ibrahim, John C. Grundy, James Hamlyn-Harris, Mohamed Almorsy, “Identifying OS Kernel Runtime Objects for Run-time Security Analysis", 6th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2012), Nov 21-23 2012, Wu Yi Shan, Fujian, China, Springer. [3] Amani S. Ibrahim, John C. Grundy, James Hamlyn-Harris, Mohamed Almorsy, “Operating System Kernel Data Disambiguation to Support Security Analysis", 6th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2012), Nov 21-23 2012, Wu Yi Shan, Fujian, China, Springer. [4] Amani S. Ibrahim, John C. Grundy, James Hamlyn-Harris, Mohamed Almorsy, “Supporting Operating System Kernel Data Disambiguation using Points-to Analysis", 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2012), Sept 3-7 2012, Essen, Germany, ACM Press. [5] Amani S. Ibrahim, James Hamlyn-Harris, John Grundy and Mohamed Almorsy, “Supporting Virtualizaion-Aware Security Solutions using a Systematic Approach to Overcome the Semantic Gap", 5th IEEE Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2012), IEEE CS Press, Waikiki, Hawai, USA, June 24-29 2012. [6] Amani S. Ibrahim, James Hamlyn-Harris, John Grundy and Mohamed Almorsy, “CloudSec: A Security Monitoring Appliance for Virtual Machines in the IaaS Cloud Model", 5th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2011), Milan, Italy on 6 – 8 September, 2011. vi Table of Contents ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................ II ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ....................................................................................................................