Security in the cloud based systems: Structure and breaches

Abstract

Cloud based systems(CBSs) are increasing in the computing world. These systems derive their complexity due to both the disparate components and the diverse stake holders involved in them. The component wise security alone does not solve the problem of securing CBSs, but the stakeholder's computational space spanning across many components of the CBS, needs to be secured too. There have been initial attempts to model the security of the cloud in terms of securing stakeholder's computational space. Some recent attempts formally model the CBS as modularized actor models, using rewriting & equational logic based modeling languages. Building on these works we present a framework for building executable models of CBSs for security analyses. We illustrate its validity showing how the recent security breaches and security solutions can be modeled and analyzed using this framework.