Category: CSE Project Reports

Public or vendor clouds and the corresponding risks 

Public clouds are widely used and the growth is also more than expected with respect to these public clouds. Apart from the wide range of business opportunities and benefits provided by these public clouds, there are more than ten types of risks associated with these public clouds. The best example of these public cloud risks is that, the dotcom boom has lead to great number of opportunities across the business to emerge towards the public clouds and most of the organizations started introducing the latest technologies with the help of these public clouds and thus want to gain the competitive advantage across the market .

Due to this implementation, most of the organizations has faced the supply chain risks as the public clouds are widely used across the vendor side and thus lead to back step towards introducing the technologies and this mainly happens due to lack of sufficient knowledge on the cloud implementation techniques across the business values perspective.

Lack of required standards and interoperability are the primary failure areas where most of the organizations has missed their concentration and thus lost a lot in terms of their business value because of these public clouds or vendor clouds. The common risks associated with these public clouds include a wide range of aspects like data integration, security across the network, availability, manageability, resource sharing, compliance, identity management, vendor viability, vendor lock in and legal ambiguity.

These risks are by default associated with the public clouds and they can’t be eliminated if a standard cloud computing aspects are not developed across the most of the organizations who are preferring the implementation of the public or vendor clouds. The detailed description of these risks associated with these public clouds is as given below with respect to the business value.

Business risks of cloud computing 

Apart from the advantages provided by the cloud computing, there are several of types of risks associated with the cloud computing and the most important among them are the business risks. In general cloud computing provides a lot of business opportunities and at the same time it has some risks associated with and most of the organizations are striving a lot to get rid of these risks and following are few identified business risks associated with cloud computing. 

• Operational risks
• Technical risks
• Commercial risks
• Legal risks

Even there is more specific business risks associated with cloud computing and the important among them are listed above. The type of risks associated with cloud computing can also be explained with reference to the type of cloud being used across the business and in general the risks are associated with different types like private cloud and public cloud and the detailed explain of the risk associated with these types of cloud across the business of most of the organizations is as given below. Different types of clouds like  private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds and community clouds comes with their own risks to the corresponding business and the actual level of impact on the business is reviewed as below.

Cloud Computing Integration for Business

Among the lot of services provided by the cloud computing service providers, data storage is the crucial one. In general the data storage facility is handled by the third party service providers and they provide multiple storage servers to the store the data of the clients and the end users. Data storage refers to the storing the client data at the off site location and remote access is provided to the clients to their data and all the required operations are done with respect to their database at the remote location. This is a good implementation provided by the cloud computing service providers, but there is some key security issues embedded with this type of implementation. As the data of the clients is stored across the remote location, they always doubt about the reliability and security of their data. To ensure the maximum confidence of the clients, even the hosting companies are striving a lot to provide the security and reliability to the client data in different forms and the key implementations with respect to this are as given below

Encryption algorithms: This is the traditional way of providing the security to the data of the clients at the remote locations. Typical encryption algorithms are implemented to ensure the identity of the users and also to eliminate the hackers using the public key and private key encryption.

Authentication: A separate set of user id and password is created to the end users who are allowed to access the client data that was maintained by the third party hosting companies and the security system implemented by the vendors always authenticate the users who tries to access the data stored at the remote location.

Authorization:  This step is mutually implemented by the clients and the service providers. A client provides the list of authorized users to the vendors in prior to store the data at the remote location and ensures that the hosting companies provide access only to these users

Introduction to Cloud computing 

Cloud computing is playing a vital role across the modern computing world. There are different ranges of services provided by the hosting companies to the clients and even the clients are showing their interest towards the services provided by the vendors. Cloud computing provides a wide range of services to the clients like computation, data access, software and storage devices and thus the clients and the end users can register with the cloud service providers to make use of these services in an effective manner without any special requirements at their side. In general there are different types of clouds across the market and they can be broadly categorized in to the following types as listed below 

Community cloud: When one or more organizations have similar requirements, these types of community clouds can be established. These organizations share the common infrastructure and computation requirements from the cloud established and thus they are benefited in terms of cost and speed.

Public cloud: Public cloud or external cloud is a more generalized cloud and access via typical internet services like web services or web applications. In general these clouds are accessed through a third party service providers and charges for the fine grained services provided to the clients and the end users.

Private cloud: Private clouds are established by the vendors across their private network and provide the network virtualization services within their organizations. 

Hybrid cloud: Hybrid cloud is basically established by the IT department for the purpose of business activities and has high end implementations and services across this type of cloud. In general these hybrid clouds are offered by the famous and large vendors like IBM, Oracle, HP and VMware and the main aim of these clouds would be around the business perspective rather than the generalized usage to the clients and the end users. 

Combined Cloud: A combined cloud is a combination of two or more clouds that were integrated for the purpose of a specific task as per the requirements of the clients and end users. In general a combined cloud is established by one or more service providers and the level of services provided by the individual providers are integrated to form a high end cloud with more number of services to the clients. 

Cloud computing is the widely used technology across the software organizations these days. In general cloud computing refers to the on demand usage of the resources required for the clients and these requirements can be on the lines of data and software through a typical computer network. If the clients or users of the cloud computing need some resources like word processing, they can request the service providers even if the required software or data is missing at their local location .

All the data and the required software operations as per the need of the clients and the users are provided by the service providers. If the client or the end users has a minimum set of software’s like a operating system or a web browser, they can be connected easily to the cloud computing service provider and enjoy the privileged benefits of the cloud provider.

In general a cloud computing technology works under the guidance of sophisticated techniques and the minimum requirement for this technology to work is a well established network with the appropriate connections to the end users and the service providers. The cloud can be accessed through an internet or an intranet or both in some cases and the service providers utilizes the network connections to provide the required services to their client or end users as per their requirements.

Dependable and Secure Storage in a Cloud-of-Clouds

The usage of the required cloud depends on the requirements of the end users and the clients and they can opt the required cloud and make the best usage of the cloud. In general the major issue that make most of the vendors or clients to think twice across the implementation of the cloud computing the data storage and the corresponding security issues related to the data storage.

Data storage across cloud computing is done at the third party level and stored across multiple servers at a separate remote location rather than the dedicated servers to a particular client. This implementation makes the clients to worry about the security of their data, as the data is stored at a remote location under the supervision of a third party which they are not aware of the security policies implemented by them. Most of the hosting companies provide ample storage space as per the requirements of the clients and the clients can store their data at the data centers, even this is a good implementation across the cloud computing, the main reason why the companies look backward is the security.

The main two issues with the cloud computing in the perspective of the clients is reliability and security. Most of the clients never show their interest towards managing their data at the third party level as the data may hold lot of confidential issues and thus they always think about the reliability of their data served by the third party service providers. To get the required confidence from the clients and the end users, most of the vendors are striving a lot to provide the at most security to their data in different forms and they implement many techniques like authentication, authorization and traditional methods like encryption algorithms. Apart from the efforts kept by the third party vendors, still the clients worry about the data stored at the remote location and always are in a mindset that their data may be accessed by unauthorized users at some time and even the clients doubt about the service providers with respect to their financial status and technical feasibility of the clouds provided by the vendors.

Frequent crashes to the clouds of the service provider may cause the clients to worry a lot with respect to their data and the corresponding reliability and security. This idea made me to work on the data storage issues of the cloud computing the learn the perspective of the small organizations who are looking to upgrade their process to a cloud computing level and following research questions are identified across this research

Aims and Objectives 

Following are the aims and objectives of this research 

Aim: To investigate and critically review the importance of data security across the cloud computing and understand how the vendors are striving to provide the confidence and security to the data of clients 

Objectives

• To review the cloud computing technology and the data storage process across the cloud computing
• To evaluate the security requirements for the data storage across the cloud
• To review the client requirements with respect to their reliability and security of their data stored at the third party vendors
• To investigate the security implementations provided by the hosting companies and understand how they achieve the confidence of the clients.
• To evaluate the roles played by the security professionals with respect to providing security to the data of the clients and end users. 

Aims and Objectives 

Aim: To propose an intruder detection system that can detect the intruder actions at the node and routing protocol level using OPNET modeler simulation 

Following are the objective of this project

• Literature search:  The investigation on the Impact of Feature Reduction on the Efficiency of Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems.

• Investigate and review the types of intrusion detection systems.
• To analyze or evaluate the impact of the feature reduction with in the efficiency of the wireless intrusion detection system.
• To make use of OPNET in order to evaluate and compare the results.
• To create three scenarios and compare the scenarios against the performance metrics used
• To evaluate the results after comparing the scenarios and understand the detection mechanism for intruder actions at the node and routing protocol level 

How the objectives will be achieved:

• The qualitative research method of approach is been used in order to collect the information or data which is required to fulfill my research work.
•  In order to obtain the information the different articles are taken in to consideration.
• These articles are gathered from different Internet sources to get the appropriate information.
• If these articles will not provide the required information, then different case studies which are been already reviewed on the relevant topic will be considered.

The process of information collection will not contain any ethical issues, as the information is been gathered in a proper way, if the articles or case studies which are to be gathered have any limitations like getting permission from the researcher of that particular articles, then the required permissions will be taken to consider that articles, and the information which is been collected will not be misused.

Paper Written & Submitted by Harsha

Detecting the intruder actions at the application and routing protocol level is the main problem considered in this project. To identify the intruder actions a simple OPNET modeler simulation is done against the MANET network and the corresponding scenarios are created and computed to estimate the intruder actions on the MANETs.

A small scale MANET is created for the simulation purpose with 20 mobile nodes and an individual wireless LAN server with AODV as the routing protocol to initiate the communication patterns across the network.  Intruder actions are detected based on their behavior on the routing protocol and the application and for this three scenarios are created where these scenarios vary at the node level settings of the AODV routing protocol.

In the first scenario all the nodes are set against the default AODV parameters and in the second scenario two nodes like node 5 and node 10 are set with the varied AODV parameters such that they act as the attack nodes and send the intruder traffic across the network. In the third scenario node 15 is also identified as the attack nodes and the corresponding routing parameters of AODV are changed such that even this node acts as the attack node and thus the overall performance of the network due to the attack nodes is estimated using the simulation. 

All the scenarios are run for 2 minutes against the application and routing protocol metrics and in this simulation a simple IP telephony voice application is used and the results are compared and evaluated to understand the role of intruders in generating the required traffic and packet manipulations across the network. The key aims and objectives identified for this project are as given below.

Paper Written & Submitted by Harsha

Wireless networks are prone to intruder attacks at a higher rate when compared to the wired network due to the loose topological conditions across the network. As most of the wireless networks contains the mobile nodes and these nodes can move along the network without any specific infrastructure requirements and thus the intruder attacks are easily propagated across the wireless networks.

In general the wireless networks provide some default security options and this level of security is not sufficient across the wireless sensor networks. There are few aspects to be covered when taking regarding the security of the wireless networks and the main among them are the routing protocol level security and the node level security.

In general the type of routing protocol used to set the communication across the network plays an important role in estimating the intruder actions and there are different types of intruder actions that will make the routing protocols null and also the nodes that support the routing protocol created. In most of the cases the intruders are successful in accessing the resources of the routing protocol and also most of the intruders has penetrated at the communication level and made the mobile nodes of the wireless networks to quit from the communication process.

There are different kinds of intruder actions in general and due to these intruder actions the basic nature of the nodes and the corresponding routing protocol is affected a lot and the affected nodes will impose more and unnecessary traffic on the network. Due to this traffic the overall performance of the network is destroyed and even the object level performance across the network is also affected a lot and the actual traffic issued by the application is lost at the destination side.

Intruder traffic and anomaly traffic are created by the intruder nodes and these nodes will ultimately make the neighboring nodes to halt their communication operations and thus the impact on the overall network is more due to the intruder nodes. There are many techniques to identify the corresponding intruder actions and indeed they will create the rough traffic patterns on the network due to the intruder nodes and till now there is no perfect solution proposed in the literature against the intruder attacks on the node level and the routing protocol level.

Among the wireless networks, MANETS are proved to be more sensitive against the intruder attacks and in this context attack nodes across the MANET are considered in this project and routing protocol level parameters are used to estimate the corresponding intruder actions on the network. All the intruder actions against the routing protocol level and node are evaluated and the corresponding actions to be taken to detect the intruder actions are also suggested in this project.

In general the intruders will manipulate the application and routing protocol parameters and then they will imposed these traffic patterns on the neighboring nodes via the routing protocol and finally the server is degraded and it will start discarding all the data packets. The main problem identified and the solution implemented to solve the problem in this project is given in the below section.

Paper Written & Submitted by Harsha