CloudSafe: A tool for an automated security analysis for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has been adopted widely, providing on-demand computing resources to improve performance and reduce operational costs. However, these new functionalities also bring new ways to exploit the cloud computing environment. To assess the security of the cloud, graphical security models can be used, such as Attack Graphs and Attack Trees. However, existing models do not consider all types of threats, and also automating the security assessment functions are difficult. In this paper, we propose a new security assessment tool for the cloud named CloudSafe, an automated security assessment for the cloud. The CloudSafe tool collates various tools and frameworks to automate the security assessment process. To demonstrate the applicability of the CloudSafe, we conducted security assessment in Amazon AWS, where our experimental results showed that we can effectively gather security information of the cloud and carry out security assessment to produce security reports. Users and cloud service providers can use the security report generated by the CloudSafe to understand the security posture of the cloud being used/provided. - 2019 IEEE.