Automated detection of malicious behavior in Cloud

 

In [1] we focused on identifying the symptoms of malicious behavior automatically as oppose to directly looking for the (signature of) malware within a Cloud. Symptoms are closely related to malware components, which are proved to be popular between the malware writers, as using of compoenents  reduce the time of writing malware and increase the quality of the malware. I strongly believe that any realistic solution to software and application security  must take into consideration the key role played by hardware security. We make use of Introspection for detecting the symptoms [2]. In addition we make use of code generation and Domain Specific Languages technology to make the developed technics accessible to security experts [3]. This research project is in collaboration with Cloud and Security at HP research Lab.

Selected publications

  1. A framework for detecting malware in Cloud by identifying symptoms  K. Harrison, B. Bordbar, S.T.T. Ali, C. Dalton and A. Norman. 16th IEEE International EDOC  Conference, 2012. (nominated for the best paper award)

  2.  Dynamic Defence in Cloud via Introspection (in preparation)

  3. A DSL for Cloud Introspection to detect malicious behavior (submitted for publication)