City Research Online

Abstract

The Big Data processing ecosystem has been constantly growing in recent years. This has been significantly reinforced by the advent of cloud computing platforms where Big Data analytics can be offered on an as-a-service basis. The ease with which users can leverage the capabilities of Big Data processing frameworks in the cloud has made them a popular solution with low up-front expenditure and a flexible deployment model. In spite of their cost benefits and flexibility of use, Big Data services in cloud platforms present us with an array of new challenges compared to traditional web services especially in the domain of data security and privacy. Their distributed nature makes them more dynamic with regards to deployment and execution but at the same time it exacerbates challenges related to data and operation security since both data and operations are shared across multiple nodes. Inevitably, distributing data and operations on multiple nodes leads to an increase in the attack surface. Given the need for systems that react fast and produce results as quickly as possible, more emphasis has been placed on performance and less so on security. Having said that, as the use of cloud computing is becoming more widespread, concerns with regards to non-functional properties such as data security are becoming more pronounced for the users. Runtime security monitoring is a mechanism that can be employed to alleviate some of the issues that emerge with respect to the activity of security monitoring for Big Data analytics services that are outsourced in the cloud. In this thesis we make the case for a monitoring framework where monitoring events are collected and evaluated against a set of monitoring rules that describe monitorable security properties of the system. The framework that we put forward can be used to assess the level of security of Big Data analytics pipelines at runtime. For our proof of concept we examine three security properties namely the service response time, the location of execution of service operations and the integrity of the intermediate data produced during the service execution.

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

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