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Building a security reference architecture for cloud systems

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Abstract

Reference architectures (RAs) are useful tools to understand and build complex systems, and many cloud providers and software product vendors have developed versions of them. RAs describe at an abstract level (no implementation details) the main features of their cloud systems. Security is a fundamental concern in clouds and several cloud vendors provide security reference architectures (SRAs) to describe the security features of their services. A SRA is an abstract architecture describing a conceptual model of security for a cloud system and provides a way to specify security requirements for a wide range of concrete architectures. We propose here a method to build a SRA for clouds defined using UML models and patterns, which goes beyond existing models in providing a global view and a more precise description. We present a metamodel as well as security and misuse patterns for this purpose. We validate our approach by showing that it can describe more precisely existing models and that it has a variety of uses. We describe in detail one of these uses, a way of evaluating the security level of a SRA.

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Notes

  1. with no implementation details.

  2. A pattern composed of simpler patterns.

  3. A secure architecture is a specific architecture with some security properties, while a SRA is a generic model representing the security features of any architecture.

  4. Party is also a pattern [65].

  5. Note that this is more precise than using misuse cases [72].

  6. As there is no pattern for this function, we can consider it a “best practice”.

  7. It lacks sections Example, Implementation, Known Uses, Consequences, and Related Patterns.

  8. An attack (threat) pattern describes a specific step leading to a misuse [94]; e.g., using a stolen credential to have access to a DBMS where we can perform a misuse by using SQL injection.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their careful evaluation and their suggestions that significantly improved the paper. The work of Eduardo Fernandez was supported by the Chilean agency CONICYT, under research contract 80120008.

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  1. Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Eduardo B. Fernandez & Keiko Hashizume

  2. Departament of Informatics, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso, Chile

    Raul Monge

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Fernandez, E.B., Monge, R. & Hashizume, K. Building a security reference architecture for cloud systems. Requirements Eng 21, 225–249 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-014-0218-7

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