Using Recursive Attestation to Scale Trust in Modern Heterogeneous Cloud Architectures

<p>As we approach the limits of Moore’s law the Cloud computing landscape is becoming ever more heterogeneous in order to extract more performance from available resources. Meanwhile, the container-based cloud is of growing importance as a lightweight way to deploy applications. A unified heterogeneous systems framework for use with container-based applications in the heterogeneous cloud is required. We present a bytecode-based framework and it’s implementation called Man O’ War, which allows for the creation of novel, portable LLVM bitcode-based containers for use in the heterogeneous cloud. Containers in Man O’ War enabled systems can be efficiently specialized for the available hardware within the Cloud and expand the frontiers for optimization in heterogeneous cloud environments. We demonstrate that a framework utilizing portable bytecode-based containers eases optimizations such as heterogeneous scaling which have the potential to improve resource utilization and significantly lower costs for users of the public cloud.</p>

Security of cloud computing is one of the challenges to be addressed before the novel pas-as-you-go business model is widely applied, and dependability is one of the most important means to improve security of current heterogeneous cloud platforms. Previous research on dependability in computing systems only uses qualitative approaches and there are few systematic works on dependability in cloud systems. In this paper, the definition of dependability in cloud systems is given and a series of quantitative indicators are presented to evaluate the dependability. A novel cloud dependability model CDSV is established to enhance the security of heterogeneous cloud environments. System-level virtualization techniques are used to enhance the dependability of cloud environments. Systematic analysis shows that this model can enhance the system dependability and security. Experimental results show that the dependability model CDSV can efficiently and safely construct dependability relationship in heterogeneous cloud environments.

The amount of data that human activities generate poses a challenge to current computer systems. Big data processing techniques are evolving to address this challenge, with analysis increasingly being performed using cloud-based systems. Emerging services, however, require additional enhancements in order to ensure their applicability to highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments and facilitate their use by Small a Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Observing this landscape in emerging computing system development, this work presents Small a Medium-sized Enterprise Data Analytic in Real Time (SMART) for addressing some of the issues in providing compute service solutions for SMEs. SMART offers a framework for efficient development of Big Data analysis services suitable to small and medium-sized organizations, considering very heterogeneous data sources, from wireless sensor networks to data warehouses, focusing on service composability for a number of domains. This paper presents the basis of this proposal and preliminary results on exploring application deployment on hybrid infrastructure.

This paper is concerned with the study and implementation of effective Data Emplacement Algorithm in large set of databases called Big Data and proposes a model for improving the efficiency of data processing and storage utilization for dynamic load imbalance among nodes in a heterogeneous cloud environment. With the era of explosive information and data receiving, more and more fields need to deal with massive, large scale of data. A method has been proposed with an improved Data Placement algorithm called Effective Data Emplacement Algorithm with computing capacity of each node as a predominant factor that promotes and improves the efficiency in data processing in a short duration time from large set of data. The adaptability of the proposed model can be obtained by minimizing the time with processing efficiency through the computing capacity of each node in the cluster. The proposed solution improves the performance of the heterogeneous cluster environment by effectively distributing data based on the performance oriented sampling as the experimental results made with word count applications.

Cloud computing is growing massively in the world of information technology. As a result of which the number of servers and virtual machines is increasing day by day. It leads to huge energy consumption and carbon emission. In this regard, task scheduling has drawn the attention of cloud service providers to reduce energy consumption and increase cloud utilization. This is a crucial issue in a heterogeneous cloud environment. In this paper, energy consumption issues of cloud datacenters are addressed and an Energy-Aware Cloud Task Scheduling (EACTS) algorithm is proposed. It is taking the concept from traditional min-min, max-min, and sufferage heuristics and merge with the energy model. These heuristics are implemented on the heterogeneous cloud environment. EACTS energy model focuses on the estimation of energy consumption in cloud datacenters. The proposed algorithms estimated the makespan, cloud utilization, and energy consumption for a benchmark dataset. The experimental results obtained from EACTS algorithm provides a valid arbitration between energy efficiency and makespan. It has shown the comparison between above mentioned algorithms for various scheduling parameters.

Most Threat Analysis (TA) techniques analyze threats to targeted assets (e.g., components, services) by considering static interconnections among them. However, in dynamic environments, e.g., the Cloud, resources can instantiate, migrate across physical hosts, or decommission to provide rapid resource elasticity to its users. Existing TA techniques are not capable of addressing such requirements. Moreover, complex multi-layer/multi-asset attacks on Cloud systems are increasing, e.g., the Equifax data breach; thus, TA approaches must be able to analyze them. This paper proposes ThreatPro, which supports dynamic interconnections and analysis of multi-layer attacks in the Cloud. ThreatPro facilitates threat analysis by developing a technology-agnostic information flow model, representing the Cloud's functionality through conditional transitions. The model establishes the basis to capture the multi-layer and dynamic interconnections during the life cycle of a Virtual Machine. ThreatPro contributes to (1) enabling the exploration of a threat's behavior and its propagation across the Cloud, and (2) assessing the security of the Cloud by analyzing the impact of multiple threats across various operational layers/assets. Using public information on threats from the National Vulnerability Database, we validate ThreatPro's capabilities, i.e., identify and trace actual Cloud attacks and speculatively postulate alternate potential attack paths.

In a heterogeneous cloud environment, the manual grading of computing assets is the first step in the process of configuring IT infrastructures to ensure optimal utilization of resources. Grading the efficiency of computing assets is however, a difficult, subjective and time consuming manual task. Thus, an automatic efficiency grading algorithm is highly desirable. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of the different criteria used in the manual grading task for automatically determining the efficiency grading of a computing asset. We report results on a dataset of 1,200 assets from two different data centers in IBM Toronto. Our preliminary results show that electrical costs (associated with power and cooling) appear to be even more informative than hardware and age based criteria as a means of determining the efficiency grade of an asset. Our analysis also indicates that the effectiveness of the various efficiency criteria is dependent on the asset demographic of the data centre under consideration.

To avoid the drawbacks of a pricing mechanism in heterogeneous cloud environments that considers only single resources, we propose a multi-resource combinatorial pricing mechanism in this paper. This approach jointly considers the principal resources (i.e., CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth) with the goal of minimizing the total cost. Then, a cost-optimized resource provisioning policy (CORPP) based on game theory is applied to this mechanism that considers the Nash equilibrium between cloud users as well as the Stackelberg equilibrium between users and the cloud provider. The experimental results show that the proposed combinatorial pricing mechanism is more suitable in a heterogeneous cloud environment when running various types of cloudlets. Moreover, CORPP is effective in reducing users' total costs when using both random cloudlets and PlanetLab cloudlets.

Well organized datacentres with interconnected servers constitute the cloud computing infrastructure. User requests are submitted through an interface to these servers that provide service to them in an on-demand basis. The scientific applications that get executed at cloud by making use of the heterogeneous resources being allocated to them in a dynamic manner are grouped under NP hard problem category. Task scheduling in cloud poses numerous challenges impacting the cloud performance. If not handled properly, user satisfaction becomes questionable. More recently researchers had come up with meta-heuristic type of solutions for enriching the task scheduling activity in the cloud environment. The prime aim of task scheduling is to utilize the resources available in an optimal manner and reduce the time span of task execution. An improvised seagull optimization algorithm which combines the features of the Cuckoo search (CS) and seagull optimization algorithm (SOA) had been proposed in this work to enhance the performance of the scheduling activity inside the cloud computing environment. The proposed algorithm aims to minimize the cost and time parameters that are spent during task scheduling in the heterogeneous cloud environment. Performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm had been performed using the Cloudsim 3.0 toolkit by comparing it with Multi objective-Ant Colony Optimization (MO-ACO), ACO and Min-Min algorithms. The proposed SOA-CS technique had produced an improvement of 1.06%, 4.2%, and 2.4% for makespan and had reduced the overall cost to the extent of 1.74%, 3.93% and 2.77% when compared with PSO, ACO, IDEA algorithms respectively when 300 vms are considered. The comparative simulation results obtained had shown that the proposed improvised seagull optimization algorithm fares better than other contemporaries.

Service recommendation aims to assist users in selecting appropriate services according to their requirements while ensuring seamless compatibility in modern cloud and edge computing environments. In dynamic multi-cloud scenarios, services are typically deployed across heterogeneous cloud platforms and are frequently reconfigured. However, most existing service recommendation approaches primarily focus on static compatibility aspects, such as service interfaces or communication protocols, while overlooking the dynamic characteristics of service interactions. However, several limitations can be identified. First, the lack of effective mechanisms for quantifying service compatibility in dynamic cloud environments often leads to degraded system efficiency. Second, the absence of dedicated multi-cloud service compatibility quantification methodologies restricts recommendation accuracy. Third, insufficient mathematical analysis with respect to uniqueness, feasibility, and correctness may result in unstable evaluation outcomes and additional computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents McCom, a multi-cloud service recommendation framework designed to quantify service compatibility performance and address the aforementioned challenges. First, a novel Markov chain-based compatibility quantification model is developed to characterize service interactions in dynamic multi-cloud environments. By exploiting the homogeneity, irreducibility, and convergence properties of Markov chains, the proposed model enables stable and reliable compatibility assessment. Second, a multi-cloud compatibility quantification strategy is introduced to mitigate interference arising from complex service pools through refined filtering and sketching mechanisms. Third, a series of mathematical proofs are provided to rigorously demonstrate the feasibility, correctness, and uniqueness of the proposed quantification method. Extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements, including enhancements in recommendation quality (14.44% in F1 score), reductions in latency (40.68%), and increases in accuracy (50.85%), compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches.

The adoption of cloud computing has grown significantly among individuals and in organizations. According to this growth, Cloud Service Providers have continuously expanded and updated cloud-computing infrastructures, which have become more heterogeneous. Managing these heterogeneous resources in cloud infrastructures while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) and minimizing energy consumption is a prominent challenge. Therefore, unifying energy consumption models to deal with heterogeneous cloud environments is essential in order to efficiently manage these resources. This paper deeply analyzes factors affecting power consumption and employs these factors to develop power models. Because of the strong correlation between power consumption and energy consumption, the influencing factors on power consumption, with the addition of other factors, are considered when developing energy consumption models to enhance the treatment in heterogeneous infrastructures in cloud computing. These models have been developed for two Virtual Machines (VMs) containing heterogeneous Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) architectures with different features and capabilities. Experiments evaluate the models through a cloud testbed between the actual and predicted values produced by the models. Deep Neural Network (DNN) power models are validated with shallow neural networks using performance counters as inputs. Then, the results are significantly enhanced by 8% when using hybrid inputs (performance counters, GPU and memory utilization). Moreover, a DNN energy-agnostic model to abstract the complexity of heterogeneous GPU architectures is presented for the two VMs. A comparison between the standard and agnostic energy models containing common inputs is conducted in each VM. Agnostic energy models with common inputs for both VMs show a slight enhancement in accuracy with input reduction.

A key focus of the SODALITE project is to assure the quality and performance of the deployments of applications over heterogeneous Cloud and HPC environments. It offers a set of tools to detect and correct errors, smells, and bugs in the deployment models and their provisioning workflows, and a framework to monitor and refactor deployment model instances at runtime. This paper presents objectives, designs, early results of the quality assurance framework and the refactoring framework.KeywordsIaCCloudHPCQualityDefectsRefactoring

This paper study the aware failure task offloading in the dynamic mobile cloud environment. Task offloading is a method which allows resource-constraint mobile devices offload compute-intensive tasks of application to the precious resource cloud computing. However, the content of the wireless network (e.g., bandwidth, signal and noise) often change; therefore, communication failure usually occurs. To deal with the dynamic content and failure of the network, we devise the Dynamic Content Aware Task Offloading Algorithm (DCTOA) and Failure Aware Algorithm (FAA) schemes. DCTOA adopts dynamic changes of the network contents, and performance evaluation shows that it outperforms existing static task offloading schemes.

This study presents a novel malware detection framework for cloud infrastructures that harnesses the power of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to achieve real-time threat identification with superior accuracy and speed. Our approach begins with the collection and meticulous preprocessing of heterogeneous cloud log data, followed by advanced feature engineering to extract meaningful patterns indicative of malicious activity. The CNN model automatically learns hierarchical representations from this high-dimensional data, resulting in a detection system that achieves an accuracy of 98.2%, a precision of 97.5%, a recall of 98.0%, and an F1-score of 97.8%. In addition, the model operates with a low latency of 12 ms, a critical factor for timely threat mitigation in dynamic cloud environments. Comparative analysis against Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest classifiers reveals that the CNN not only outperforms these models in key performance metrics but also maintains a significant advantage in processing speed. These findings highlight the potential of CNN-based approaches to enhance cybersecurity defenses, offering a scalable and efficient solution for detecting evolving malware threats in cloud infrastructures.

Energy efficiency (EE) is a key requirement for the design of short-range communication network. In order to alleviate energy consumption (EC) constraint, a novel layered heterogeneous mobile cloud architecture is proposed in this paper. Based on the proposed layered heterogeneous mobile cloud architecture, we establish an appropriate energy consumption model, and design an energy efficiency scheme based on joint data packet fragmentation and cooperative transmission and analyze the energy efficiency corresponding to different packet sizes and the cloud size. Simulation results show that, when all nodes of the cloud are accessing the same size of data packet fragmentation, the proposed layered heterogeneous mobile cloud architecture can provide significant energy savings. The results provide useful insights into the possible operation of the strategies and show that significant energy consumption reductions are possible.