An agent based business aware incident detection system for cloud environments

Abstract

Classic intrusion detection mechanisms are not flexible enough to cope with cloud specific characteristics such as frequent infrastructure changes. This makes them unable to address new cloud specific security issues. In this paper we introduce the cloud incident detection system Security Audit as a Service (SAaaS). It is built upon intelligent autonomous agents, which are aware of underlying business driven intercommunication of cloud services. This enables the presented SAaaS architecture to be flexible and to supported cross customer event monitoring within a cloud infrastructure. A contribution of this paper it to provide a high-level design of the SAaaS architecture, an introduction into the proposed Security Business Flow Language (SBFL), a first prototype of an autonomous agent and an evaluation about, which cloud specific security problems are addressed by the presented architecture. It is shown that autonomous agents and behaviour analysis are fertile approaches to detect cloud specific security problems and can create a cloud audit system. © 2012 Doelitzscher et al.; licensee Springer.