City Research Online

Abstract

Cloud Computing technology offers an advanced approach for the provision of infrastructure, platform and software services without the need of extensive cost of owning, operating or maintaining the computational infrastructures required. However, despite being cost effective, this technology has raised concerns regarding the security, privacy and compliance of data or services offered through cloud systems. This is mainly due to the lack of transparency of services to the consumers, or due to the fact that service providers are unwilling to take full responsibility for the security of services that they offer through cloud systems, and accept liability for security breaches [18]. In such circumstances, there is a trust deficiency that needs to be addressed.

The potential of certification as a means of addressing the lack of trust regarding the security of different types of services, including the cloud, has been widely recognised [149]. However, the recognition of this potential has not led to a wide adoption, as it was expected. The reason could be that certification has traditionally been carried out through standards and certification schemes (e.g., ISO27001 [149], ISO27002 [149] and Common Criteria [65]), which involve predominantly manual systems for security auditing, testing and inspection processes. Such processes tend to be lengthy and have a significant financial cost, which often prevents small technology vendors from adopting it [87].

In this thesis, we present an automated approach for cloud service certification, where the evidence is gathered through continuous monitoring. This approach can be used to: (a) define and execute automatically certification models, to continuously acquire and analyse evidence regarding the provision of services on cloud infrastructures through continuous monitoring; (b) use this evidence to assess whether the provision is compliant with required security properties; and (c) generate and manage digital certificates to confirm the compliance of services with specific security properties.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	Doctoral Theses School of Science & Technology > School of Science & Technology Doctoral Theses School of Science & Technology > Computer Science

Export

Downloads