Tauber, Markus

2018-03, Schluga, Oliver, Bauer, Elisabeth, Bicaku, Ani, Maksuti, Silia, Tauber, Markus, Wöhler, Alexander

The fast growing number of cloud based Infrastructure-as-a-Service instances raises the question, how the operations security depending on the underlying cloud computing infrastructure can be sustained and guaranteed. Security standards provide guidelines for information security controls applicable to the provision and use of the cloud services. The objectives of operations security are to support planning and sustaining of day-to-day processes that are critical with respect to security of information environments. In this work we provide a detailed analysis of ISO 27017 standard regarding security controls and investigate how well popular cloud platforms can cater for them. The resulting gap of support for individual security controls is furthermore compared with outcomes of recent cloud security research projects. Hence the contribution is twofold, first we identify a set of topics that still require research and development and secondly, as a practical output, we provide a comparison of popular industrial and open-source platforms focusing on private cloud environments, which are important for Industry 4.0 use cases.

2019, Pellegrini, Roland, Ivkić, Igor, Tauber, Markus

Cloud Service Providers deliver their products in form of ”as-a-Service”, which are typically categorized by the level of abstraction. This approach hides the implementation details and shows only functionality to the user. However, the problem is that it is hard to measure the performance of Cloud services, because they behave like black boxes. Especially with Function-as-a-Service it is even more difficult because it completely hides server and infrastructure management from users by design. Cloud Service Prodivers usually restrict the maximum size of code, memory and runtime of Cloud Functions. Nevertheless, users need clarification if more ressources are needed to deliver services in high quality. In this regard, we present the architectural design of a new Function-as-a-Service benchmarking tool, which allows users to evaluate the performance of Cloud Functions. Furthermore, the capabilities of the framework are tested on an isolated platform with a specific workload. The results show that users are able to get insights into Function-as-a-Service environments. This, in turn, allows users to identify factors which may slow down or speed up the performance of Cloud Functions.

2017-12, Bauer, Elisabeth, Schluga, Oliver, Maksuti, Silia, Bicaku, Ani, Hofbauer, David, Ivkić, Igor, Wöhrer, Alexander, Tauber, Markus

The popularity of cloud based Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) solutions is becoming increasingly popular. However, since IaaS providers and customers interact in a flexible and scalable environment, security remains a serious concern. To handle such security issues, defining a set of security parameters in the service level agreements (SLA) between both, IaaS provider and customer, is of utmost importance. In this paper, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) guidelines are evaluated to extract a set of security parameters for IaaS. Furthermore, the level of applicability and implementation of this set is used to assess popular industrial and open-source IaaS cloud platforms, respectively VMware and OpenStack. Both platforms provide private clouds, used as backend infrastructures in Industry 4.0 application scenarios. The results serve as initial work to identify a security baseline and research needs for creating secure cloud environments for Industry 4.0.

2018, Pellegrini, Roland, Ivkić, Igor, Tauber, Markus

In a world, where complexity increases on a daily basis the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) cloud model seams to take countermeasures. In comparison to other cloud models, the fast evolving FaaS increasingly abstracts the underlying infrastructure and refocuses on the application logic. This trend brings huge benefits in application and performance, but comes with difficulties for benchmarking cloud applications. In this position paper, we present an initial investigation of benchmarking FaaS in close to reality production systems. Furthermore, we outline the architectural design including the necessary benchmarking metrics. We also discuss the possibility of using the proposed framework for identifying security vulnerabilities.