A circular chain intrusion detection for cloud computing based on improved AdjointVM approach

Abstract

Cloud computing has recently emerged and gained momentum to implement existing networks and data centers in a new architecture to enable services in a timely manner. Although it offers tremendous opportunities, there are some major challenges, such as security, that must be solved for efficient usage. Confidentiality is one of the most important points of information security especially in financial, governmental and military usage. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for cloud computing to protect cloud users from the untrusted cloud providers and untrusted employees. The proposed approach is built as an improvement on an existing model, which is called AdjointVM. In this model, it is aimed to overcome one of the weakest points of AdjointVM model, the defenselessness of the protection architecture, and to build a more secure cloud environment for users. In AdjointVM, to protect the VM, there have to be two configured VMs: the protected VM and the protector VM. These VMs are connected in a circular chain to monitor intrusions. Unlike AdjointVM, in which the number of running VMs is proportional to the number of VMs that have to be protected, in the proposed model, this number remains the same, and this results in a decrease in the capital expenditure (capex).