Requirements-based threat analysis
ESCUDO-CLOUD developed an innovative solution to ascertain data ownership threats in Cloud systems by analyzing the system’s functional requirements. The Requirements-Based Theat Analysis (RBTA) process (see figure) assesses the assumptions (direct or indirect) that underlie a requirement, determines the dependencies across the requirements along with capturing the likelihood and severity of the assumptions getting violated.
The viability and effectiveness of the RBTA process was established by its ability to identify specific requirement level threats in the ESCUDO-CLOUD Use Cases. The basic RBTA ideology led to the development of a generalized Cloud threat model that can capture both functional and operational behavior. The overall innovations covered:
- Development of a novel dependency analysis schema to capture horizontal and vertical dependencies across requirements and services.
- Development of a holistic Cloud threat model applicable to diverse Cloud instantiations.
- Tool support for automation of Cloud threat analysis.
Related Publications
- Ahmed Taha, Patrick Metzler, Ruben Trapero, Jesus Luna, Neeraj Suri "Identifying and Utilizing Dependencies Across Cloud Security Services" in Proc. of 11th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2016), Xi'an, China, May 30- June 3, 2016
- Jesus Luna, Ahmed Taha, Ruben Trapero, and Neeraj Suri "Quantitative Reasoning about Cloud Security Using Service Level Agreements" in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), 2017
- Salman Manzoor, Jesus Luna and Neeraj Suri "AttackDive: Diving Deep into the Cloud Ecosystem to Explore Attack Surfaces" in Proc. of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2017), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, June 25-30, 2017