Abstract
Enterprise networks are migrating to the public cloud to acquire computing resources for promising benefits in terms of efficiency, expense, and flexibility. Except for some public services, the enterprise network islands in cloud are expected to be absolutely isolated from each other. However, some “stealthy bridges” may be created to break such isolation due to two features of the public cloud: virtual machine image sharing and virtual machine co-residency. This paper proposes to use cross-layer Bayesian networks to infer the stealthy bridges existing between enterprise network islands. Prior to constructing cross-layer Bayesian networks, cloud-level attack graphs are built to capture the potential attacks enabled by stealthy bridges and reveal hidden possible attack paths. The result of the experiment justifies the cross-layer Bayesian network’s capability of inferring the existence of stealthy bridges given supporting evidence from other intrusion steps in a multi-step attack.
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Notes
- 1.
In our trust model, we assume cloud providers are fully trusted by cloud customers. In addition to security alerts generated at cloud level, such as alerts from hypervisors or cache monitors, the cloud providers also have the privilege of accessing alerts generated by customers’ virtual machines.
- 2.
The assumption here is that a capable vulnerability scanner is able to scan out all the known vulnerabilities.
- 3.
The enterprise networks in Step 7 are not key players, so we do not analyze the stealthy bridges established in this step, but still use the raised alerts as evidence.
- 4.
Aws,Bws,Cws,Cnfs,Cworkstation denote A’s web server, B’s web server, C’s web server, C’s NFS server, C’s workstation respectively.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by ARO W911NF-09-1-0525 (MURI), NSF CNS-1223710, NSF CNS-1422594, ARO W911NF-13-1-0421 (MURI), and AFOSR W911NF1210055.
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Sun, X., Dai, J., Singhal, A., Liu, P. (2015). Inferring the Stealthy Bridges Between Enterprise Network Islands in Cloud Using Cross-Layer Bayesian Networks. In: Tian, J., Jing, J., Srivatsa, M. (eds) International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 152. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_1
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