Network Instruction and detection of zombie exploration of security measurement, mitigation, countermeasures

RECENT studies have shown that users migrating to the cloud consider security as the most important factor. A recent Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey shows that among all security issues, abuse and nefarious use of cloud computing is considered as the top security threat, in which attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in clouds and utilize cloud system resources to deploy attacks. where cloud users usually have the privilege to control software installed on their managed VMs, may not work effectively and can violate the Service Level Agreement (SLA). cloud users can install vulnerable software on their VMs, which essentially contributes to loopholes in cloud security. The challenge is to establish an effective vulnerability/attack detection and response system for accurately identifying attacks and minimizing the impact of security breach to cloud users. The shared infrastructure benefits attackers to exploit vulnerabilities of the cloud and use its resource to deploy attacks in more efficient ways. Such attacks are more effective in the cloud environment since cloud users usually share computing resources, e.g., being connected through the same switch, sharing with the same data storage and file systems, even with potential attackers. The similar setup for VMs in the cloud, e.g., virtualization techniques, VMOS, installed vulnerable software, networking, etc., attracts attackers to compromise multiple VMs. The design of NICE does not intend to improve any of the existing intrusion detection algorithms; indeed, NICE employs a reconfigurable virtual networking approach to detect and counter the attempts to compromise VMs, thus preventing zombie VMs.