A fingerprinting system calls approach for intrusion detection in a cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud Computing envisioned as the next generation architecture for IT enterprises, has proliferated itself due to the advantages it provides. Cloud Computing provides solutions for carrying out efficient, scalable and low cost computing. Due to the distributed nature of cloud based system, it is vulnerable to a large category of attacks out of which VM based attacks are most common. To counter these attacks we need Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which is used to monitor network traffic and policy violations from unauthorized users. Anomaly Detection is a technique of Intrusion Detection, which is used to detect intrusions by monitoring system activity and finding out patterns that do not comply with the normal behavior. In this paper an approach for anomaly detection in cloud environment is presented, which is based upon analysis of system call sequences generated by the virtual machines to the hypervisor. Our proposed implementation prevents malicious VM users to modify well known frequently executed programs.