Using Diversity in Cloud-Based Deployment Environment to Avoid Intrusions

This paper puts forward a generic intrusion-avoidance architecture to be used for deploying web services on the cloud. The architecture, targeting the IaaS cloud providers, avoids intrusions by employing software diversity at various system levels and dynamically reconfiguring the cloud deployment environment. The paper studies intrusions caused by vulnerabilities of system software and discusses an approach allowing the system architects to decrease the risk of intrusions. This solution will also reduce the so-called system’s days-of-risk which is calculated as a time period of an increased security risk between the time when a vulnerability is publicly disclosed to the time when a patch is available to fix it. © 2011 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details GORBENKO, A., KHARCHENKO, V., TARASYUK, O., ROMANOVSKY, A. Using Diversity in Cloud-Based Deployment Environment to Avoid Intrusions [By] A. Gorbenko, V. Kharchenko, O. Tarasyuk, A. Romanovsky Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University: Computing Science, 2011. (Newcastle University, Computing Science, Technical Report Series, No. CS-TR-1262)