A Design Methodology for Developing Resilient Cloud Services (RCS)

Published

November 1, 2017

Author(s)

Abdella Battou, Salim Hariri

Abstract

Cloud Computing is emerging as a new paradigm that aims at delivering computing as a utility. For the cloud computing paradigm to be fully adopted and effectively used, it is critical that the security mechanisms are robust and resilient to malicious faults and attacks. Security in cloud computing is of major concern [1] and a challenging research problem since it involves many interdependent tasks including application layer firewalls, configuration management, alert monitoring and analysis, source code analysis, and user identity management. It is widely accepted that we cannot build software and computing systems that are free from vulnerabilities and cannot be penetrated or attacked. Therefore, it is widely accepted that cyber resilient techniques are the most promising solutions to mitigate cyber-attacks and change the game to advantage the defender over the attacker. Moving Target Defense (MTD) has been proposed as a mechanism to make it extremely difficult for an attacker to exploit existing vulnerabilities by varying the attack surface of the execution environment. By continuously changing the environment (e.g. software versions, programming language, operating system, connectivity, etc.), we can shift the attack surface and, consequently, evade attacks. In this chapter, we present a methodology for designing resilient cloud services that is based on the following capabilities: Redundancy, Diversity, Shuffling, and Autonomic Management. Redundancy is used to tolerate attacks if any redundant version or resource is compromised. The diversity is to use to avoid the software monoculture problem where one attack vector can successfully attack many instances of the same software module.

Citation

Handbook of System Safety and Security

Publisher Info

Elsevier, New York, NY

Pub Type

Book Chapters

Citation

Battou, A. and hariri, S. (2017), A Design Methodology for Developing Resilient Cloud Services (RCS), Handbook of System Safety and Security, Elsevier, New York, NY (Accessed February 17, 2025)