OSC-MC: Online Secure Communication Model for Cloud Environment

TL;DR

The paper introduces OSC-MC, a model that enhances cloud security by detecting and terminating malicious virtual machines and links, significantly reducing network congestion and power consumption.

Contribution

It presents a novel online security framework that proactively identifies and mitigates malicious activities in cloud environments before threats occur.

Findings

Improves authorized inter-VM communication by up to 34.5%.

Reduces network hogs by 66.46%.

Lowers power consumption by 39.31%.

Abstract

A malicious cloud user may exploit outsourced data involved in online communication, co-residency, and hypervisor vulnerabilities to breach and hamper sensitive information, and inject malicious traffic-based congestion, rendering services to other benign users. To address this critical and challenging the problem, this letter proposes an Online Secure Communication Model for Cloud (OSC-MC) by identifying and terminating malicious VMs and inter-VM links prior to the occurrence of security threats. The anomalous network traffic, bandwidth usage, and unauthorized inter-VM links are security breach indicators which guides secure cloud communication and resource allocation. The simulation and comparison of the proposed model with existing approaches reveal that it significantly improves authorised inter-communication links up to 34.5% with a reduction of network hogs, and power consumption by 66.46% and 39.31%, respectively.