Online Analysis of Security Risks in Elastic Cloud Applications

Abstract

Security-related concerns in elastic cloud applications call for a risk-based approach due to the inherent trade-offs among security and other nonfunctional requirements, such as performance. To this end, the authors advocate a solution that can be efficiently realized through modeling the application behavior as a Markov decision process, on top of which probabilistic model checking is applied. The article explains the main steps in this approach and illustrates its use in online analysis and decision making regarding elasticity decisions. The runtime analysis is capable of providing evidence for key security-related aspects of the running applications, such as the probability of data leakage in the next hour.