Auditing and Analysis of Network Traffic in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing allows users to remotely store their data into the cloud and provides on-demand applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. The security of the outsourced data in the cloud is dependent on the security of the cloud computing system and network. Though, there have been numerous efforts on securing data on the cloud computing system, evaluation of data security on the network between cloud provider and its users is still a very challenging task. The audit of the cloud computing system and network will provide insights on the security and performance of VMs and the operating system on multiple data centers and the intra-cloud network managed by cloud providers and the wide-area network between the cloud user and cloud provider. Thus, network traffic analysis for cloud auditing is of critical importance so that users can resort to an external audit party to verify the data security on the network between cloud provider and its users. This paper presents the following key technologies required to analyze network traffic in the cloud computing environment: IP geolocation of network devices between cloud provider and its users, monitoring the data security of the cloud network path, and online mining of massive cloud auditing logs generated by cloud network traffic.