Self-adaptive authorisation in OpenStack cloud platform

Abstract

Although major advances have been made in protection of cloud platforms against malicious attacks, little has been done regarding the protection of these platforms against insider threats. This paper looks into this challenge by introducing self-adaptation as a mechanism to handle insider threats in cloud platforms, and this will be demonstrated in the context of OpenStack. OpenStack is a popular cloud platform that relies on Keystone, its identity management component, for controlling access to its resources. The use of self-adaptation for handling insider threats has been motivated by the fact that self-adaptation has been shown to be quite effective in dealing with uncertainty in a wide range of applications. Insider threats have become a major cause for concern since legitimate, though malicious, users might have access, in case of theft, to a large amount of information. The key contribution of this paper is the definition of an architectural solution that incorporates self-adaptation into OpenStack Keystone in order to handle insider threats. For that, we have identified and analysed several insider threats scenarios in the context of the OpenStack cloud platform, and have developed a prototype that was used for experimenting and evaluating the impact of these scenarios upon the self-adaptive authorisation system for the cloud platforms.