Harmonized Monitoring for High Assurance Clouds

Due to a lack of transparency in cloud based
services well-defined security levels cannot be assured within cur-
rent cloud infrastructures. Hence sectors with stringent security
requirements hesitate to migrate their services to the cloud. This
applies especially when considering services where high security
requirements are combined with legal constraints. To tackle this
challenge this paper presents an extension to our existing work on
assurance methodologies in cloud based environments by inves-
tigating how current state of the art monitoring solutions can be
used to support assurance throughout the entire infrastructure. A
case study is used in which monitoring information representing
a set of relevant security properties is being collected. As result,
we propose that a combination of existing tools should be used
to harmonize existing monitoring artifacts. We describe and
evaluate an Evidence Gathering Mechanism (EGM) that provides
this harmonization and show how this can support assurance.
This can also underpin legal proceedings from an evidence law
perspective.