An architecture for cross-cloud auditing
Rui Xie, Rose Gamble · 2013
Auditing message exchange in a cloud involves logging interactions between services that are dynamically composed to satisfy a client's request to the cloud. Additional cloud management services are needed to facilitate audit record capture of events occurring within the end-to-end round trip messaging of the composition and to analyze the resulting audit assets for security anomalies. When an external cloud, possibly in a federation, has a service needed for the task, audit assets must be conveyed back to the originating cloud for disclosure of communications and resource accesses. Otherwise, the external cloud may hide any potential vulnerabilities related to information tainting, message attacks, and resource misuse since these security risks cannot be directly assessed. In this paper, we underscore the importance of designing cross-cloud communications to retain security audit information to assess message and resource vulnerabilities and maintain federation trust. We present an architecture and a message schema for management, communication, and analysis.