research-article

Inevitable Failure: The Flawed Trust Assumption in the Cloud

Authors:

Giuseppe Petracca,

Trent JaegerAuthors Info & Claims

CCSW '14: Proceedings of the 6th edition of the ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security

Pages 141 - 150

https://doi.org/10.1145/2664168.2664180

Published: 07 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

IaaS clouds offer customers on-demand computing resources such as virtual machine, network and storage. To provision and manage these resources, cloud users must rely on a variety of cloud services. However, a wide range of vulnerabilities have been identified in these cloud services that may enable an adversary to compromise customers' computations or even the cloud platform itself. Using the motivation for adding mandatory access to commercial operating systems, we argue for the development of a secure cloud operating system (SCOS) to enforce mandatory access control (MAC) over cloud services and customer instances. To better understand the concrete challenges of building a SCOS, we examine the OpenStack cloud platform from two perspectives: (1) how attacks propagate across cloud services and (2) how adversaries leverage vulnerabilities in cloud services to attack hosts. Using this information, we review the application of three MAC approaches employed by "secure" commercial systems to evaluate their practical effectiveness for controlling cloud services. While MAC enforcement can improve security for cloud services, several threats remain unchecked. We outline a set of additional security policy goals that a SCOS must enforce to control threats from potentially compromised cloud services comprehensively. While we do not actually construct a SCOS in this paper, we hope that this study will initiate discussions that may lead to practical designs.

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Cited By

Gu JHua ZLi MChen H(2022)Innovations and applications of operating system security with a hardware-software co-designChinese Science Bulletin10.1360/TB-2022-055767:32(3862-3871)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1360/TB-2022-0557
Hogan KMaleki HRahaeimehr RCanetti Rvan Dijk MHennessey JVaria MZhang H(2019)On the Universally Composable Security of OpenStack2019 IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev)10.1109/SecDev.2019.00015(20-33)Online publication date: Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SecDev.2019.00015
Zhang TLee R(2018)Design, Implementation and Verification of Cloud Architecture for Monitoring a Virtual Machine's Security HealthIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2017.278082367:6(799-815)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2017.2780823
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Inevitable Failure: The Flawed Trust Assumption in the Cloud
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security services
    1. Access control
  2. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CCSW '14: Proceedings of the 6th edition of the ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security

November 2014

160 pages

ISBN:9781450332392

DOI:10.1145/2664168

General Chair:
Gail-Joon Ahn
Arizona State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Alina Oprea
RSA Laboratories, USA
,
Reihaneh Safavi-Naini
University of Calgary, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Published: 07 November 2014

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CCS'14: 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 7, 2014

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CCSW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 36 submissions, 33%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 37 of 108 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Gu JHua ZLi MChen H(2022)Innovations and applications of operating system security with a hardware-software co-designChinese Science Bulletin10.1360/TB-2022-055767:32(3862-3871)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1360/TB-2022-0557
Hogan KMaleki HRahaeimehr RCanetti Rvan Dijk MHennessey JVaria MZhang H(2019)On the Universally Composable Security of OpenStack2019 IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev)10.1109/SecDev.2019.00015(20-33)Online publication date: Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SecDev.2019.00015
Zhang TLee R(2018)Design, Implementation and Verification of Cloud Architecture for Monitoring a Virtual Machine's Security HealthIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2017.278082367:6(799-815)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2017.2780823
Sulaiyam Al Amri S(2018)IaaS-cloud security enhancement: An intelligent attribute-based access control framework2018 Majan International Conference (MIC)10.1109/MINTC.2018.8363159(1-9)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/MINTC.2018.8363159
Sun YPetracca GGe XJaeger TSchwab SRobertson WBalzarotti D(2016)PileusProceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference on Computer Security Applications10.1145/2991079.2991109(52-64)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2991079.2991109
Sze WSrivastava ASekar RChen XWang XHuang X(2016)Hardening OpenStack Cloud Platforms against Compute Node CompromisesProceedings of the 11th ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2897845.2897851(341-352)Online publication date: 30-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897845.2897851
Sun YPetracca GJaeger TVijayakumar HSchiffman J(2015)Cloud ArmorProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing10.1109/CLOUD.2015.42(253-260)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CLOUD.2015.42

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