Abstract
Cloud computing has undergone rapid expansion throughout the last decade. Many companies and organizations have made the transition from traditional data centers to the cloud due to its flexibility and lower cost. However, traditional data centers are still being relied upon by those who are less certain about the security of cloud. This problem is highlighted by the fact that there only exist limited efforts on threat modeling for cloud data centers. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive threat modeling exercises based on two representative cloud infrastructures using several popular threat modeling methods, including attack surface, attack trees, attack graphs, and security metrics based on attack trees and attack graphs, respectively. Those threat modeling efforts provide cloud providers practical lessons and means toward better evaluating, understanding, and improving their cloud infrastructures. Our results may also imbed more confidence in potential cloud tenants by providing them a clearer picture about potential threats in cloud infrastructures and corresponding solutions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
National vulnerability database. http://www.nvd.org. Accessed 20 Feb 2015
National Institute of Standards and Technology: Cloud Computing Service Metrics Description (2015). http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/upload/RATAX-CloudServiceMetricsDescription-DRAFT-20141111.pdf. Accessed 17 June 2015
Adler, B.: Google Compute Engine Performance Test with RightScale and Apica (2013). http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry-insights/google-compute-engine-performance-test-rightscale-and-apica. Accessed 26 March 2016
Bakshi, K.: Cisco cloud computing-data center strategy, architecture, and solutions (2009). http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/gov/CiscoCloudComputing_WP.pdf
Barr, J.: Building three-tier architectures with security groups (2010). https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/building-three-tier-architectures-with-security-groups/. Accessed 28 March 2016
Dahbur, K., Mohammad, B., Tarakji, A.B.: A survey of risks, threats and vulnerabilities in cloud computing. In: Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent Semantic Web-Services and Applications, ISWSA 2011, New York, NY, USA, pp. 12: 1–12: 6. ACM (2011)
Dewri, R., Ray, I., Poolsappasit, N., Whitley, D.: Optimal security hardening on attack tree models of networks: a cost-benefit analysis. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 11(3), 167–188 (2012)
Edge, K.S., Dalton, G.C., Raines, R.A., Mills, R.F.: Using attack and protection trees to analyze threats and defenses to homeland security. In: MILCOM 2006–2006 IEEE Military Communications conference, pp. 1–7, October 2006
Frigault, M., Wang, L.: Measuring network security using Bayesian network-based attack graphs. In: 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications, COMPSAC 2008, pp. 698–703, July 2008
Grobauer, B., Walloschek, T., Stöcker, E.: Understanding cloud computing vulnerabilities. IEEE Secur. Priv. 9(2), 50–57 (2011)
Gruschka, N., Jensen, M.: Attack surfaces: a taxonomy for attacks on cloud services. In: 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing, pp. 276–279, July 2010
Hany, M.: VMware VSphere in the Enterprise. http://www.hypervizor.com/diags/HyperViZor-Diags-VMW-vS4-Enterprise-v1-0.pdf. Accessed 05 Feb 2015
Ingalsbe, J.A., Shoemaker, D., Mead, N.R.: Threat modeling the cloud computing, mobile device toting, consumerized enterprise-an overview of considerations. In: AMCIS (2011)
Luna, J., Ghani, H., Germanus, D., Suri, N.: A security metrics framework for the cloud. In: 2011 Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT), pp. 245–250, July 2011
Manadhata, P., Wing, J.: An attack surface metric. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 37(3), 371–386 (2011)
Mell, P., Scarfone, K., Romanosky, S.: Common vulnerability scoring system. IEEE Secur. Priv. 4(6), 85–89 (2006)
Openstack. Openstack Operations Guide. http://docs.openstack.org/openstack-ops/content/openstack-ops_preface.html. Accessed 27 Aug 2015
Ray, I., Poolsapassit, N.: Using attack trees to identify malicious attacks from authorized insiders. In: Vimercati, S.C., Syverson, P., Gollmann, D. (eds.) ESORICS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3679, pp. 231–246. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). doi:10.1007/11555827_14
Saripalli, P., Walters, B.: Quirc: a quantitative impact and risk assessment framework for cloud security. In: 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing, pp. 280–288, July 2010
Schneier, B.: Attack trees. Dr. Dobb’s J. 24(12), 21–29 (1999)
Shaikh, F.B., Haider, S.: Security threats in cloud computing. In: 2011 International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST), pp. 214–219, December 2011
Sheyner, O., Haines, J., Jha, S., Lippmann, R., Wing, J.M.: Automated generation and analysis of attack graphs. In: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 273–284 (2002)
Squillace, R.: Azure infrastructure services implementation guidelines (2015). https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-infrastructure-service-guidelines/. Accessed 28 March 2016
Wang, L., Islam, T., Long, T., Singhal, A., Jajodia, S.: An attack graph-based probabilistic security metric. In: Atluri, V. (ed.) DBSec 2008. LNCS, vol. 5094, pp. 283–296. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-70567-3_22
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was partially supported by the National Institutes of Standard and Technology under grant number 60NANB16D287, by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIP-1266147, and by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under Discovery Grant N01035.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Alhebaishi, N., Wang, L., Jajodia, S., Singhal, A. (2017). Threat Modeling for Cloud Data Center Infrastructures. In: Cuppens, F., Wang, L., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Tawbi, N., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (eds) Foundations and Practice of Security. FPS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51966-1_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51966-1_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51965-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51966-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)