Modeling and Analysis of Dynamic Infrastructure Clouds

Misconfigurations and insider attacks contribute to one of the major technical risks in multi-tenant cloud computing: the lack of resource isolation. Breaches in tenant isolation put both the cloud provider as well as the consumers at risk. The dynamic nature of infrastructure clouds increases the risk for misconfigurations because of their self-service administration and rapid provisioning. We tackle this challenge by establishing a practical security system that proactively analyzes changes induced by cloud management operations with regard to a security policy. We achieve this by contributing the first formal model of cloud management operations and their impact on a virtualized infrastructure. Our approach combines such a model of operations with a security policy verification as well as an information flow analysis suited for isolation policies. Our system finds practical applications in change planning as well as in auditing of changes at run-time. We evaluate our system for virtualized infrastructures in laboratory and production settings, and it yields a performance suitable for applications in practice.

By: Soeren Bleikertz, Thomas Gross, Sebastian Moedersheim

Published in: RZ3859 in 2013

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