Trustworthy Cloud Computing Technology

March 28, 2012 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from HostReview.  Author: William Smith.

Cloud computing technology makes enormous computing processing capacity and software available for an economical price through the help of Internet. By availing services of a cloud computing or cloud hosting service provider, users gets many economic benefits as they have to pay only for the amount of computing resources that they consume.

A cloud computing or cloud hosting service provider offers a great number of advantages to the end user organizations. User organizations have to pay only for the amount of computing resources that they consume. User organizations can buy only the required services as and when actually needed, and do not have to buy the costly infrastructure…

A cloud computing service provider provisions full security to the users by deploying cutting edge security measures like a threat detection system. A threat detection system detects the actual attackers (threats) along with their properties (such as skill). Detection of threats is done by using the output from one or more intrusion detection system or systems (each detecting attacks) and then clustering attacks into groups of attacks which correspond to a single threat. The result of the above cited procedure is a list of threats along with their attacks. A threat detection system has three components – one or more than one intrusion detection systems or IDS, a threat classifier, and one or more than one threat profilers. A threat profiler is that important component of a threat detection system or a TDS which obtains a list of threats along with attacks from another threat detection system’s component known as threat classifier. Three different threat profilers are recognized, viz. – the intensity class profiler, the skill class profiler, and the android profiler.

The android profiler used by a cloud computing services provider is a type of threat profiler used by a cloud hosting service provider which defines whether a given threat is a human or a computer. The android profiler is based on the observation of an inhuman behavior. Threats that execute attacks manually have to think prior to the next request and they are required to manually type the attack. It must have been a computer program performing these attacks, if the interval between two attacks is too small. Thus, an android profiler’s algorithm uses a set of threshold values. Different thresholds for attacks within one hour, within one minute, and within one second are set.

A threat is deemed to be a computer program when all of the attacks are performed at a speed which is not possible by a human being as is defined by the thresholds. The threat is identified as being a human being, when a threat performs at least some manual attacks. Such a threat which has been identified as a human being is able to perform only manual attacks or a combination of both automated attacks and manual attacks. In an android profiler, a threat may be considered human when the number of attacks that are not the part of computer attacks is above a certain threshold value. For example, if the threat executes only a tool, then all attacks are within the computer thresholds and no human attacks will be counted. If the threat then tries some attacks himself, they will count towards the human threshold. The exact thresholds are configurable, but they represent properties of the actual threats and therefore will not change much between different networks. This means that the thresholds can be set once using an experiment. The values can then be used by many different networks, under the assumption that the threats will not change.

Most business intensive applications become very easy to use when hosted through a cloud services provider. QuickBooks, Peachtree accounting software, ACT! CRM (Customer relationship management) software, MS SQL Server, etc. can be easily hosted using cloud computing technology.