Towards Online Smart Disguise: Real-Time Diversification Evading Co-Residency Based Cloud Attacks
Mona S. Kashkoush, Mohamed Azab, Mohamed Eltoweissy, Gamal Attiya · 2017
Security is a major challenge in Cloud Computing. Attacks exploiting resource virtualization vulnerabilities such as cross-VM side-channel, VM escape, and VM hopping constitute significant threats. Hosted VMs may act as a potential attack-source against neighboring VMs or cloud infrastructure. Inspired by the sea-chameleons camouflaging process to evade predators, in this paper we propose an Online Smart Disguise Framework (OSDF). Our OSDF employs dynamic, proactive, real-time moving target defense against cloud attacks. We realize behavior obscuring by frequently and efficiently migrating live VMs between heterogeneously configured compute nodes to avoid host-based attacks. To evaluate the efficiency of OSDF and the effectiveness of OSDF-managed frequent live migrations in limiting attack dispersion and avoiding host-based attacks, we devised the VEAR model based on the SEIR epidemic model. The SEIR model is an epidemiological model commonly used to investigate disease dispersion on cooperative communities. The implementation of OSDF is tested on OpenStack private cloud. Simulation results show the impact of the frequent VM live migration on decreasing the number of attacked VMs even for fast-spreading worms.