Taking back control of privacy: a novel framework for preserving cloud-based firewall policy confidentiality

Abstract

As the cloud computing paradigm evolves, new types of cloud-based services have become available, including security services. Some of the most important and most commonly adopted security services are firewall services. These cannot be easily deployed in a cloud, however, because of a lack of mechanisms preserving firewall policy confidentiality. Even if they were provided, the customer traffic flowing through the Cloud Service Provider infrastructure would still be exposed to eavesdropping and information gaining by performing analysis. To bypass these issues, the following article introduces a novel framework, known as the Ladon Hybrid Cloud, for preserving cloud-based firewall policy confidentiality. It is shown that in this framework, a high level of privacy is provided thanks to leveraging an anonymized firewall approach and a hybrid cloud model. A number of optimization techniques, which help to further improve the Ladon Hybrid Cloud privacy level, are also introduced. Finally, analysis performed on the framework shows that it is possible to find a trade-off between the Ladon Hybrid Cloud privacy level, its congestion probability, and efficiency. This argument has been demonstrated through the results of conducted experiments.