Abstract—Until now, many researches have carried out analyzing the vulnerabilities as well as finding the defense strategies for malicious insider (MI) at cloud environment. However, all these previous works only considered the perspective of MI attacks that are originated from tenant side in a public cloud. Furthermore, in these existing works, the MI attack techniques are only basically and abstractly described. Without the proof of concept, MI attacks are just theoretical threats. In this paper, we consider the scenario that MI executes the attack inside the Cloud IaaS vendor. Moreover, in order to show the realistic of MI attacks in the scenario, this paper introduces three concrete MI attacks with a proof of concept implementation based on existing tools. Three introduced MI attacks in this paper are: memory scanning, template poisoning, and snapshot cracking. The demonstration result shows that MI attacks inside cloud IaaS vendor are no longer potential threats but realistic issues that we need to consider.
Index Terms—CloudStack, malicious insider, insider threats, cloud computing, cloud security, security threats.
Minh-Duong Nguyen, Ngoc-Tu Chau, Seungwook Jung, and Souhwan Jung are with Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea (e-mail: nguyenminhduong@ssu.ac.kr, chaungoctu@ssu.ac.kr, seungwookj@ssu.ac.kr, souhwanj@ssu.ac.kr).
Cite: Minh-Duong Nguyen, Ngoc-Tu Chau, Seungwook Jung, and Souhwan Jung, "A Demonstration of Malicious Insider Attacks inside Cloud IaaS Vendor," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 483-486, 2014.