Deception in Cyberspace: Con-Man Attack in Cloud Services
Md Minhaz Chowdhury · NDSU Repository (North Dakota State University) · 2018
A con-man deception appears in services from cyberspace, e.g., in cloud services. A cloud-service provider deceives by repeatedly providing less service than promised and deliberately avoids service monitoring. Such a repeated shortfall is beneficial for the cloud-service provider but victimizes the service?s legitimate consumers. This deception is called a con-man deception. A con-man-resistant trust algorithm is used as a proactive measure against such deception, reducing the deception?s severity on the victim?s end. This trust algorithm detects a con-man deception by evaluating a cloud service?s expected versus actual behavior. This detection application reveals the con-man-resistant trust algorithm?s previously veiled properties. With this dissertation, a study of these properties reveals some necessary enhancements for this algorithm. The previous con-man-resistant trust-algorithm applications only considered the pattern of service-shortfall repetition. However, for cloud applications, the service-shortfall magnitude at each repetition is also important. Hence, an exponential growth-function-based extension of this algorithm is proposed and implemented. The algorithm?s initial parameter configuration has a significant influence on the con-deception detection pace. Some consumers tolerate intense repetition of service shortfall, and some consumers can tolerate mild repetition. Hence, the deception-detection pace has a correlation with the consumer?s perspective. A machine-learning extension of the con-man-resistant trust algorithm can ascertain a consumer?s perspective by analyzing that consumer?s historical usage of the same cloud service. The result of this learning is a parameter configuration that reflects the consumer?s perspective. The loss associated with a con deception is significant on the consumer?s side. Hence, the work presented in this dissertation contributes to cybersecurity by attempting to minimize such deception in cyberspace.