How Much Your Cloud Management Platform Is Secure? OpenStack Use Case

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) and firewalls are the de facto solutions in the modern cloud to detect cyberattacks and minimize potential hazards for tenant networks. Most of the existing firewalls, perimeter security, and middlebox solutions are built on static rules/signatures or simple rule matching, making them inflexible, susceptible to bugs, and difficult to introduce new services. This paper aims to improve network management in OpenStack Clouds by taking advantage of the combination of software-defined networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) and for making networks more predictable, reliable, and secure. Artificial intelligence is being used to monitor the behavior of the virtual machines and applications running in the OpenStack SDN cloud so that when any issues or degradations are noticed, the decision can be quickly made on how to handle that issue, being able to analyze data in motion, starting at the edge. The OpenStackDP framework comprises lightweight monitoring, anomaly-detecting intelligent sensors embedded in the data plane, a threat analytics engine based on ML/AI algorithms running inside switch hardware/network co-processor, and defensive actions deployed as virtual network functions (VNFs). This network data plane-based architecture makes high-speed threat detection and rapid response possible and enables a much higher degree of security. We have built the framework with advanced streaming analytics technologies, algorithms, and machine learning to draw knowledge from this data that is in motion before the malicious traffic goes to the tenant compute nodes or long-term data store. Cloud providers and users will benefit from improved Quality-of-Services (QoS) and faster recovery from cyber-attacks and compromised switches. The multi-phase collaborative anomaly detection scheme demonstrates an accuracy of 99.81%, average latencies of 0.27 ms, and response speed within 9 s. The simulations and analysis show that the OpenStackDP network analytics framework substantially secures and outperforms prior SDN-based OpenStack solutions for Cloud architectures.

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A Security Analysis and Assessment for Petri Net-Based OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

Morshedi

Matinkhah

2023

Preprint

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Cloud computing is an important innovation in the current computing model that can provide an easy way to host and manage infrastructure and applications. Accordingly, due to the rapid growth of cloud computing over the past few years, security concerns have been raised. Various methods have been proposed for more security in the use of cloud computing, but not enough efforts have been made to evaluate the above methods. Providing and guaranteeing security as one of the most important open issues in cloud computing has always been the focus of researchers. The cloud service provider must adopt the necessary security strategies to increase the security of service allocation, operation continuity, storage management, information security and privacy protection in order to satisfy and reassure customers. Dealing with the challenges and threats identified in this environment requires providing a basic solution. In this article, infrastructure services as a service in cloud computing are described and the vulnerability of each is analyzed. According to the Petri net modeling tool, a new method to evaluate the security of infrastructure systems as a service is presented and analyzed. In this method, it is tried to be able to analyze the desired service provider and then define it through official models, thus creating an executive model of it, which can be serviced by applying existing security features. He evaluated the intended provider in terms of security and other characteristics. With the help of this method, the level of security of infrastructure systems as a service in cloud computing can be compared and evaluated. Then, using the Petri net modeling tool, one of the famous business systems for providing infrastructure as a service called Openstack is modeled and the behavior of attacks on it is evaluated. Applying the mentioned method on the Openstack system shows that our work has good security and it is expected that researchers, designers and companies providing cloud services will make significant use of the results in order to increase the security of services.

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How Much Your Cloud Management Platform Is Secure? OpenStack Use Case

Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

A Comprehensive Study on Eucalyptus, Open Stack and Cloud Stack

A Comprehensive Study on Eucalyptus, Open Stack and Cloud Stack

OpenStackDP: a scalable network security framework for SDN-based OpenStack cloud infrastructure

A Security Analysis and Assessment for Petri Net-Based OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

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