3D-IDS: IaaS user-oriented Intrusion Detection System
Jie He
1
, Chuan Tang
2
, Yuexiang Yang
1
, Yong
Qiao
1
1
School of computer,
2
Information Center
National University of Defense Technology
Changsha, China
[hejie, tangchuan, yyx, qiaoyong]@nudt.edu.cn
Chaobin Liu
Corresponding author
Information Center
The Second Military Medical University
Shanghai, China
liuchaobin-66@163.com
Abstract—Being the core technology of IaaS (Infrastructure as
a Service) cloud computing data center, server virtualization
can virtualize servers with surplus resources to multiple virtual
machines with diverse configurations according to users’
demands. This can significantly improve the utilization of
computing resources. Traditional intrusion detection
techniques are no longer suitable for security detection of IaaS
cloud computing data centers any more due to the specificity of
IaaS architecture. Furthermore, most current intrusion
detection systems (IDS) for cloud environment are provider-
oriented. It’s hard for IaaS users to obtain the statuses of
virtual machines rented by them. In this paper, we designed a
three-dimensional intrusion detection system (3D-IDS).
Through a distributed collection of information on virtual
machines, such as system logs, host behaviors and network
behaviors, our system can synthesize related information to
supply detailed security statuses of each virtual machine for
IaaS users.
Keywords-Cloud Computing; IaaS; Virtualization Security;
Intrusion Detection
I. INTRODUCTION
Characterized by hosting IT resources, cloud computing
is becoming prevailing nowadays. According to the U.S.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
cloud computing services can be divided into Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and
Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS allows data centers to
gather computer infrastructures such as CPU, memory, I/O
device, etc. together to form a virtual pool of resources, and
provide different users with virtual machines on demand,
using virtualization technology.
IaaS service providers can provide basic security
measures for their virtual machines, including firewalls,
virus protection and regularly upgraded operating system [1].
However, these security measures are invisible to the users
who rent the virtual machines. Consequently, security
statuses of rented virtual machines are unknown for the users.
They have no idea with whether their virtual machines are
exactly safe as their owner declared. This fact is analogous to
that the host will ensure the basic safety of his rooms, but the
lodgers cannot get these security states. In order to allow
users to get these security statuses initiatively real-time and
systematically during renting, we designed a novel IaaS user-
oriented 3-dimensional intrusion detection system (3D-IDS).
The 3D-IDS is distributed deployed on rented virtual
machines. Three types of security information including
system logs, host behaviors and network behaviors are
collected in real-time and synthetically .Based on that, 3D-
IDS provides detailed security statuses of each virtual
machine for IaaS users.
II. BACKGROUND
Current intrusion detection system (IDS) can be divided
into host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) and
network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) [2].
However, these traditional IDSs are not effective in cloud
computing environment [3]. New methods are needed to
address the novel challenges. Using Hadoop’s MapReduce
algorithm analysis of IDS log files, Shun-fa Yang et al. [4]
integrated kinds of IDSs and provided effective reports for
cloud system administrator. Jun-Ho Lee et al. [5] proposed a
method that enables cloud computing system to achieve both
effectiveness of using the system resource and strength of the
security service without trade-off between them. Nascimento
et al. [6] presented a study of the use of anomaly-based IDSs
with data from a production environment in SaaS cloud
infrastructure. However, these efforts are all cloud
computing provider-oriented. In this paper, from the
perspective of IaaS users, a new three-dimensional IDS was
designed to help IaaS users be aware of the security statuses
of virtual machines they have rented in real time.
Currently, Amazon and Rackspace are the main IaaS
service providers. Some open source projects, such as
Eucalyptus [7] and OpenStack, are also widely used to build
IaaS data center. The server virtualization technology of IaaS
brings new challenges to detect intrusions in cloud
environment, while improving the utilization of computing
resources.
In order to detect intrusions on regular data centers
without server virtualization technology, we can set traffic
mirror and deploy NIDS on the switch. However, in the
context of IaaS data centers, the communication between
virtual machines may be carried through within the same
physical server. On the other hand, the communication port
of the switch may be changed when virtual machines are
migrated to different physical server. Therefore, traditional
NIDSs are no longer applicable in intrusions detection on the
IaaS data centers. One alternate is to carry out intrusion
detection at the hypervisor of the virtual system. It is
2012 Fourth International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering
978-0-7695-4951-4/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISISE.2012.12
12
2012 Fourth International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering
2160-1283/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISISE.2012.12
12
2012 Fourth International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering
2160-1283/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISISE.2012.12
12
2012 Fourth International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering
2160-1283/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISISE.2012.12
12