Optimal resource allocation for protecting system availability against random cyber attacks

Wang, Li; Ren, Shangping; Ke, Yanxiong; Kwiat, Kevin

doi:10.1109/iccrd.2011.5764062

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…An analogy to the use of decoy VMs can be drawn from the chaff cloud spread by a military aircraft, which are made of cheap materials but can effectively fool the enemy's radar and avoid the attack on the aircraft. Although the use of false-target-based defense has also been studied in the related work [22] [23], this paper is the first to study its real use in cloud-based mission-critical computing for survivability.…”

Section: B Decoy Vm Clonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-level VM replication based survivability for mission-critical cloud computing

Zhao

D'Ugard

Kwiat

et al. 2015

2015 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM)

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The elasticity and economics of cloud computing offer significant benefits to mission-critical applications which are increasingly complex and resource demanding. Cloud systems also provide powerful tools such as virtual machine (VM) based replication for defending mission-critical applications. However, cloud-based mission-critical computing raises serious challenges to mission assurance. VM-based consolidation brings different applications to the same set of physical resources, increasing the risk of one user compromising the mission of another. The mission-critical application in a VM lacks the visibility and control to detect and stop outside malicious attacks, whereas the support for security isolation from existing cloud systems is also limited. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to address these challenges and improve the survivability of missioncritical applications through the novel use of VM replication. Specifically, this paper presents a new multi-level VM replication approach which uses different types of VM clones to provide a variety of protections to mission-critical applications, and improve the survivability of the applications under accidental faults and malicious attacks. In this approach, full VM clones are employed to provide tolerance of attacks, decoy clones are created to divert attacks, and honeypot clones are used to analyze attacks. The paper also presents the prototypes of the proposed approach implemented for the widely used OpenStack-based private cloud systems and Amazon-EC2-based public cloud systems.

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Section: B Decoy Vm Clonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-level VM replication based survivability for mission-critical cloud computing

Zhao

D'Ugard

Kwiat

et al. 2015

2015 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM)

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“…First, the system models are different. In this paper, the system reliability depends on the reliability of a set of selected voting replicas and whether they are compromised or not, while in (Wang et al, , 2011, the system reliability is the probability that all critical components survive the attacks. Second, the protection approaches are different.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal Voting Strategy against Random and Targeted Attacks

Wang

Ren

et al. 2013

International Journal of Secure Software Engineering

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Replication and value selection through voting are commonly used approaches to tolerating naturally caused failures. Without considering intentionally introduced failures, such as failures caused by attacks, having more replication or residency often makes the system more reliable. However, when both the reliability of individual replicas and the existence of attackers are taken into consideration, the number of replicas that participate in a voting process has significant impact on system reliability. In this paper, the authors study the problem of deciding the optimal number of participating voters that maximizes the reliability of voting results under two different types of attacks, i.e., random attack and targeted attack, and develop algorithms to find the optimal voting strategy. A set of experiments are performed to illustrate how the optimal voting strategy varies under different system settings and how the number of voting participants affects the system's reliability.

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“…As is evident in Table 8, the value of contest intensity determines the nature of a battle. However, there should be no obvious trend for network compromise probability based on the different values of contest intensity [14][15][16][17]. In other words, the value of contest intensity prefers neither the defender nor the commanders.…”

Section: The Relationship Between Synergy Effectiveness and Contest Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This function has been widely used in the literature addressing various economicsrelated activities, as well as international and civil wars [12,13]. In recent years, this theory has also been applied to the determination of the success probability for the attacker to compromise a system [14][15][16][17]. The form of contest success function is as follows:…”

Section: Scenariomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cyber-Attack Synergy Model Considering Both Positive and Negative Impacts from Each Attacker

Wang

Hung

Rau

et al. 2015

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

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An emerging attack strategy, collaborative attack, is considered the next generation type of attack. There are only a few models quantifying the synergy of a collaborating attack. Further, previous models consider only positive effects regardless of potential disharmonious factors which are common in the real world. Contributions of this work are summarized as follows: first, this paper introduces a mathematical formulation measuring synergy which takes both positive and negative effects into consideration. This model can not only be applied in measuring collaborative attack effectiveness, but also be used to describe the synergy in other teamwork scenarios. The scenario of an applicable cyber-warfare can take place in a wired network, wireless network, or sensor network. Secondly, a meaningful connection between contest success function and Cobb-Douglas function is proposed and integrated in a cyber-attack scenario. Both the contest intensity of the contest success function and the sum of exponents of CobbDouglas function reflect an environmental factor regarding whether it encourages investing or not. Lastly, comparisons between the proposed model and the Cobb-Douglas function are also presented with a subsequent discussion of implications. The behavior of the proposed model is closer to reality and less coupled to another exogenous variable, contest intensity.

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Optimal resource allocation for protecting system availability against random cyber attacks

Cited by 12 publications

References 26 publications

Multi-level VM replication based survivability for mission-critical cloud computing

Multi-level VM replication based survivability for mission-critical cloud computing

Optimal Voting Strategy against Random and Targeted Attacks

A Cyber-Attack Synergy Model Considering Both Positive and Negative Impacts from Each Attacker

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