A Flow Sensitive Security Model for Cloud Computing Systems
Wen Ying Zeng, Chunyan Mu, Maciej Koutny, Paul Watson · 2013
Federated cloud systems increase the reliability and reduce the cost of computational support to an organization. The resulting combination of secure private clouds and less secure public clouds impacts on the security requirements of the system. To meet these security requirements, applications need to be located within different clouds, which strongly affects the information flow security of the entire system. In this paper, a flow sensitive security model for a federated cloud system is proposed, secure information flow in such a system is analyzed using coloured Petri nets, and opacity of cloud computing systems is introduced. In this study, the entities of a federated cloud system are assigned security levels of a given flow lattice. A transition system is used to describe the behavior of the system, and coloured Petri nets are used to analyze the correctness of the entire system. As a result, one can track the information flow. Moreover, one can analyze the impact of different resource allocation strategies, and the opacity of the system. © 2013 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details ZENG, W., CHUNYAN, M., KOUTNY, K. A Flow Sensitive Security Model for Cloud Computing Systems [By] W. Zeng, C. Mu and M. Koutny Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University: Computing Science, 2013. (Newcastle University, Computing Science, Technical Report Series, No. CS-TR-1387)