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Cloud Security and Privacy
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Cloud Security and Privacy

A special issue of Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy (ISSN 2624-800X). This special issue belongs to the section "Privacy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2025 | Viewed by 16007

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Martin Gilje Jaatun

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
IDE, University of Stavanger, 4021 Stavanger, Norway
Interests: software security; cloud security; critical infrastructure security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Massimiliano Rak

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Engineering, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Via Roma 29, 81031 Aversa, Italy
Interests: cloud; system security; security assessment; cloud security; HPC; security SLA
Dr. Ferhat Ozgur Catak

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
IDE, University of Stavanger, 4021 Stavanger, Norway
Interests: cyber security; 5G/6G and beyond wireless systems; data privacy; machine/deep learning covering the theoretical, applicative, and computational aspects; deep learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cloud computing is a cost-effective way of provisioning infrastructure and software, but challenges related to privacy and security still trouble many potential users and keep cloud computing from reaching its true potential. This Special Issue aims to publish novel approaches to security and privacy in the cloud.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Securing Machine Learning in the cloud;
  • Trusted execution and confidential computing;
  • Virtual machine and container security;
  • Cloud accountability and auditing;
  • Cloud authentication and authorization;
  • Blockchain cloud services;
  • Cryptography in the cloud;
  • Hypervisor security;
  • Cloud identity management and security as a service;
  • The prevention of data loss or leakage;
  • Secure, interoperable identity management;
  • Cloud trust and credential management;
  • Trust models for cloud services;
  • Usable security risk management in the cloud.

Prof. Dr. Martin Gilje Jaatun
Dr. Massimiliano Rak
Dr. Ferhat Ozgur Catak
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

Jump to: Review, Other

24 pages, 5484 KiB  
Article
Machine Learning Detection of Cloud Services Abuse as C&C Infrastructure
by Turki Al lelah, George Theodorakopoulos, Amir Javed and Eirini Anthi
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2023, 3(4), 858-881; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp3040039 - 1 Dec 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1914
Abstract
The proliferation of cloud and public legitimate services (CLS) on a global scale has resulted in increasingly sophisticated malware attacks that abuse these services as command-and-control (C&C) communication channels. Conventional security solutions are inadequate for detecting malicious C&C traffic because it blends with [...] Read more.
The proliferation of cloud and public legitimate services (CLS) on a global scale has resulted in increasingly sophisticated malware attacks that abuse these services as command-and-control (C&C) communication channels. Conventional security solutions are inadequate for detecting malicious C&C traffic because it blends with legitimate traffic. This motivates the development of advanced detection techniques. We make the following contributions: First, we introduce a novel labeled dataset. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for training and evaluating detection techniques aimed at identifying malicious bots that abuse CLS as C&C channels. Second, we tailor our feature engineering to behaviors indicative of CLS abuse, such as connections to known CLS domains and potential C&C API calls. Third, to identify the most relevant features, we introduced a custom feature elimination (CFE) method designed to determine the exact number of features needed for filter selection approaches. Fourth, our approach focuses on both static and derivative features of Portable Executable (PE) files. After evaluating various machine learning (ML) classifiers, the random forest emerges as the most effective classifier, achieving a 98.26% detection rate. Fifth, we introduce the “Replace Misclassified Parameter (RMCP)” adversarial attack. This white-box strategy is designed to evaluate our system’s detection robustness. The RMCP attack modifies feature values in malicious samples to make them appear as benign samples, thereby bypassing the ML model’s classification while maintaining the malware’s malicious capabilities. The results of the robustness evaluation demonstrate that our proposed method successfully maintains a high accuracy level of 84%. In sum, our comprehensive approach offers a robust solution to the growing threat of malware abusing CLS as C&C infrastructure. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Security and Privacy)
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Figure 1

Figure 1
<p>Global distribution of market share among different OS used in desktop PCs [<a href="#B7-jcp-03-00039" class="html-bibr">7</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 2
<p>VirusTotal submission by file format [<a href="#B8-jcp-03-00039" class="html-bibr">8</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 3
<p>Detailed diagram of the structure of a Portable Executable (PE) file [<a href="#B10-jcp-03-00039" class="html-bibr">10</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 4
<p>Abuse of CLS as C&amp;C infrastructure.</p> Full article ">Figure 5
<p>Detailed workflow for extracting a sub-dataset from the VirusTotal datasets.</p> Full article ">Figure 6
<p>Illustrative overview of the proposed detection system.</p> Full article ">Figure 7
<p>Feature importance highlighting the prominence of “potential_C&amp;C_api_calls” among the top influential features in the model.</p> Full article ">Figure 8
<p>Accuracy and subset of features using InfoGain.</p> Full article ">Figure 9
<p>Accuracy and subset of features using chi-squared.</p> Full article ">Figure 10
<p>Accuracy and subset of features using ReliefF.</p> Full article ">Figure 11
<p>Comparative analysis of wrapper feature selection: RF-SFSF vs. RF-SFSB vs. RF-RFE, highlighting the optimal feature count for maximum accuracy as indicated by dotted lines.</p> Full article ">Figure 12
<p>Comparative analysis of wrapper feature selection: DT-SFSF vs. DT-SFSB vs. DT-RFE, highlighting the optimal feature count for maximum accuracy as indicated by dotted lines.</p> Full article ">

Review

Jump to: Research, Other

36 pages, 1830 KiB  
Review
Security in Cloud-Native Services: A Survey
by Theodoros Theodoropoulos, Luis Rosa, Chafika Benzaid, Peter Gray, Eduard Marin, Antonios Makris, Luis Cordeiro, Ferran Diego, Pavel Sorokin, Marco Di Girolamo, Paolo Barone, Tarik Taleb and Konstantinos Tserpes
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2023, 3(4), 758-793; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp3040034 - 26 Oct 2023
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 7576
Abstract
Cloud-native services face unique cybersecurity challenges due to their distributed infrastructure. They are susceptible to various threats like malware, DDoS attacks, and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks. Additionally, these services often process sensitive data that must be protected from unauthorized access. On top of that, [...] Read more.
Cloud-native services face unique cybersecurity challenges due to their distributed infrastructure. They are susceptible to various threats like malware, DDoS attacks, and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks. Additionally, these services often process sensitive data that must be protected from unauthorized access. On top of that, the dynamic and scalable nature of cloud-native services makes it difficult to maintain consistent security, as deploying new instances and infrastructure introduces new vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, efficient security solutions are needed to mitigate potential threats while aligning with the characteristics of cloud-native services. Despite the abundance of works focusing on security aspects in the cloud, there has been a notable lack of research that is focused on the security of cloud-native services. To address this gap, this work is the first survey that is dedicated to exploring security in cloud-native services. This work aims to provide a comprehensive investigation of the aspects, features, and solutions that are associated with security in cloud-native services. It serves as a uniquely structured mapping study that maps the key aspects to the corresponding features, and these features to numerous contemporary solutions. Furthermore, it includes the identification of various candidate open-source technologies that are capable of supporting the realization of each explored solution. Finally, it showcases how these solutions can work together in order to establish each corresponding feature. The insights and findings of this work can be used by cybersecurity professionals, such as developers and researchers, to enhance the security of cloud-native services. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Security and Privacy)
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Figure 1

Figure 1
<p>A systematic mapping process that involves key aspects, features, and solutions for security in cloud-native services. Key aspects are colored green, features are colored blue, and solutions are colored red for illustration purposes.</p> Full article ">Figure 2
<p>Comparison between perimeter security model and zero-trust model.</p> Full article ">Figure 3
<p>Data and control planes of a service mesh, adapted from <a href="https://www.nginx.com/blog/what-is-a-service-mesh/" target="_blank">https://www.nginx.com/blog/what-is-a-service-mesh/</a> (accessed on 15 August 2023).</p> Full article ">Figure 4
<p>Architecture of an autonomic and cognitive security management framework, adapted from [<a href="#B19-jcp-03-00034" class="html-bibr">19</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 5
<p>Architecture of the security framework with the enablers and tools, adapted from [<a href="#B19-jcp-03-00034" class="html-bibr">19</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 6
<p>Modern application stack and risk profile.</p> Full article ">Figure 7
<p>Secure SDLC.</p> Full article ">Figure 8
<p>Static Application Security Testing (SAST).</p> Full article ">Figure 9
<p>Software Composition Analysis (SCA).</p> Full article ">Figure 10
<p>Container security.</p> Full article ">Figure 11
<p>Infrastructure-as-Code.</p> Full article ">

Other

Jump to: Research, Review

26 pages, 2564 KiB  
Systematic Review
Leveraging Towards Access Control, Identity Management, and Data Integrity Verification Mechanisms in Blockchain-Assisted Cloud Environments: A Comparative Study
by Swatisipra Das, Rojalina Priyadarshini, Minati Mishra and Rabindra Kumar Barik
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2024, 4(4), 1018-1043; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp4040047 - 2 Dec 2024
Viewed by 682
Abstract
Today, IT organizations largely rely on cloud computing services to meet their infrastructure needs, making it the backbone of the industry. However, several challenges remain that need to be effectively addressed. Data breaches, identity and access management problems, unsafe interfaces and APIs, data [...] Read more.
Today, IT organizations largely rely on cloud computing services to meet their infrastructure needs, making it the backbone of the industry. However, several challenges remain that need to be effectively addressed. Data breaches, identity and access management problems, unsafe interfaces and APIs, data loss, shared technology vulnerabilities, compliance and legal issues, inadequate data encryption, lack of visibility and control, delayed security patching, and the requirement to have faith in the cloud service provider’s security procedures are the primary security challenges in cloud computing. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising technology to address many of these security issues. In this paper, an extensive study is carried out to analyze the security issues in the cloud and the categorization of gathered security issues in terms of security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and privacy. Research questions are framed to dig deeper into the different blockchain-enabled solutions present to resolve cloud security issues, such as access control, identity management (IDM), and data integrity verification, along with their analysis. In-detail comparative analysis of the above blockchain-assisted solutions is also presented along with the future research directions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Security and Privacy)
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Figure 1

Figure 1
<p>Graphical representation of papers taken from different journals for this study.</p> Full article ">Figure 2
<p>PRISMA framework for the current research.</p> Full article ">Figure 3
<p>Categorization of cloud security issues based on five security requirements.</p> Full article ">Figure 4
<p>Workflow of data access in model “AuthPrivacyChain” [<a href="#B33-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">33</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 5
<p>Data storage and access procedure of model “BACC” [<a href="#B61-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">61</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 6
<p>Data storage and access mechanism of “BMAC” model [<a href="#B62-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">62</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 7
<p>The procedure of data uploading and sharing of the model “CBFF” [<a href="#B63-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">63</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 8
<p>Data storage and access mechanism of model “BC-ABAC” [<a href="#B65-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">65</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 9
<p>Data access and user authentication procedure of blockchain-based IDM model for cloud data [<a href="#B74-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">74</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 10
<p>User authentication procedure of “EIDM” [<a href="#B75-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">75</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 11
<p>SSO token generation [<a href="#B77-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">77</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 12
<p>IAS token generation and authentication verification [<a href="#B78-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">78</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 13
<p>The decentralized solution of upload and integrity verification of data files proposed in [<a href="#B35-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">35</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 14
<p>The decentralized storage and integrity verification of a data file suggested in [<a href="#B81-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">81</a>].</p> Full article ">Figure 15
<p>Integrity and deduplication verification process suggested in [<a href="#B83-jcp-04-00047" class="html-bibr">83</a>].</p> Full article ">
33 pages, 5059 KiB  
Systematic Review
Abuse of Cloud-Based and Public Legitimate Services as Command-and-Control (C&C) Infrastructure: A Systematic Literature Review
by Turki Al lelah, George Theodorakopoulos, Philipp Reinecke, Amir Javed and Eirini Anthi
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2023, 3(3), 558-590; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp3030027 - 1 Sep 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 4358
Abstract
The widespread adoption of cloud-based and public legitimate services (CPLS) has inadvertently opened up new avenues for cyber attackers to establish covert and resilient command-and-control (C&C) communication channels. This abuse poses a significant cybersecurity threat, as it allows malicious traffic to blend seamlessly [...] Read more.
The widespread adoption of cloud-based and public legitimate services (CPLS) has inadvertently opened up new avenues for cyber attackers to establish covert and resilient command-and-control (C&C) communication channels. This abuse poses a significant cybersecurity threat, as it allows malicious traffic to blend seamlessly with legitimate network activities. Traditional detection systems are proving inadequate in accurately identifying such abuses, emphasizing the urgent need for more advanced detection techniques. In our study, we conducted an extensive systematic literature review (SLR) encompassing the academic and industrial literature from 2008 to July 2023. Our review provides a comprehensive categorization of the attack techniques employed in CPLS abuses and offers a detailed overview of the currently developed detection strategies. Our findings indicate a substantial increase in cloud-based abuses, facilitated by various attack techniques. Despite this alarming trend, the focus on developing detection strategies remains limited, with only 7 out of 91 studies addressing this concern. Our research serves as a comprehensive review of CPLS abuse for the C&C infrastructure. By examining the emerging techniques used in these attacks, we aim to make a significant contribution to the development of effective botnet defense strategies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cloud Security and Privacy)
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<p>Botnet elements.</p> Full article ">Figure 2
<p>Illustration of (<b>a</b>) traditional C&amp;C server communication and (<b>b</b>) CPLS platforms being abused as C&amp;C.</p> Full article ">Figure 3
<p>Process for extracting relevant articles.</p> Full article ">Figure 4
<p>The number of included publications from pre-defined (<b>a</b>) academic and (<b>b</b>) industrial sources.</p> Full article ">Figure 5
<p>Number of abuses by year for each technique.</p> Full article ">Figure 6
<p>Correlation between number of users and abuse occurrences.</p> Full article ">
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