VULCAN: Vulnerability Assessment Framework for Cloud Computing

Abstract

Assessing security of software services on Cloud is complex because the security depends on the vulnerability of infrastructure, platform and the software services. In many systems, the platform or the infrastructure on which the software will actually run may not be known or guaranteed. This implies that the security of the software service must be assured regardless of the underlying infrastructure or platform, requiring a large number of combinations. Another common trend in Cloud and Service oriented Architecture (SoA) environments is Service composition, whereby new services can be created rapidly by composing existing services. Once again, the component services must be tested for security levels on a large number of platform and infrastructure combinations. In this paper we propose a novel vulnerability assessment framework for cloud computing systems. We have designed and developed a prototype of our framework. We also present the design and development of our framework with some use cases.