Implementing an interface to integrate an existing IDS to OpenStack cloud

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School of Science | Master's thesis
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Date

2013

Department

Tietotekniikan laitos

Major/Subject

Tietokoneverkot

Mcode

T-110

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

87 s. + liitt. 9

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Abstract

Security threats in cloud computing are among the top concerns for organisations considering moving their services to the cloud. In traditional networks, specialized security appliances like intrusion detection systems (IDS) were used to detect and prevent attacks in the network. The same security services are needed in the cloud environment. However, new deployment strategies would be required because of the scalable and distributed architecture of the cloud model. In this thesis, we propose to integrate an IDS with the cloud computing environment. We aim to offer an on-demand IDS service which makes it possible to monitor network traffic both to the internet and between V:Ms. As a proof of concept, we integrate an existing intrusion detection system, SNORT, with an open source cloud operating system, OpenStack. The reason for choosing OpenStack is the pluggable architecture of its networking component, Quantum. Its architecture allows us to offer advanced networking services like firewall, billing and IDS. The client can request these services using RESTful Quantum APIs. The plugin chosen for our implementation is the Open vSwitch plugin as it supports port mirroring and switch traffic monitoring with sFlow. In our prototype implementation, we modified an existing Quantum API. The modified API initiates intrusion detection and sFlow services to monitor a tenant virtual machine hosted in the OpenStack cloud. However, as a long term solution, we propose standardising a new API for initiating the IDS services and provide its specifications. While working on the thesis we found that the monitoring can hamper the network performance. Hence, we also provide performance measurements of using Open vSwitch with sFlow and port mirroring in OpenStack. As a baseline for comparing the performance we used Open vSwitch running as a virtual switch in a Linux environment. The measurements indicate that port mirroring is not very resource intensive while sFlow can impact both throughput and latency.

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Supervisor

Aura, Tuomas

Thesis advisor

Abu Shohel, Ahmed

Keywords

IDS, cloud, OpenStack, quantum, open vSwitch, sFlow, port mirroring

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Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-2020122859703

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[dipl] Perustieteiden korkeakoulu / SCI