Cloud Security Using Fine-Grained Efficient Information Flow Tracking
Authors: Alqahtani Fahad , Almutairi Mohammed , Sheldon Frederick T. 
Published: March 2024

This study provides a comprehensive review and comparative analysis of existing Information Flow Tracking (IFT) tools which underscores the imperative for mitigating data leakage in complex cloud systems. Traditional methods impose significant overhead on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and management activities, prompting the exploration of alternatives such as IFT. By augmenting consumer data subsets with security tags and deploying a network of monitors, IFT facilitates the detection and prevention of data leaks among cloud tenants. The research here has focused on preventing misuse, such as the exfiltration and/or extrusion of sensitive data in the cloud as well as the role of anonymization. The CloudMonitor framework was envisioned and developed to study and design mechanisms for transparent and efficient IFT (eIFT). The framework enables the experimentation, analysis, and validation of innovative methods for providing greater control to cloud service consumers (CSCs) over their data. Moreover, eIFT enables enhanced visibility to assess data conveyances by third-party services toward avoiding security risks (e.g., data exfiltration). Our implementation and validation of the framework uses both a centralized and dynamic IFT approach to achieve these goals. We measured the balance between dynamism and granularity of the data being tracked versus efficiency. To establish a security and performance baseline for better defense in depth, this work focuses primarily on unique Dynamic IFT tracking capabilities using e.g., Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Consumers and service providers can negotiate specific security enforcement standards using our framework. Thus, this study orchestrates and assesses, using a series of real-world experiments, how distinct monitoring capabilities combine to provide a comparatively higher level of security. Input/output performance was evaluated for execution time and resource utilization using several experiments. The results show that the performance is unaffected by the magnitude of the input/output data that is tracked. In other words, as the volume of data increases, we notice that the execution time grows linearly. However, this increase occurs at a rate that is notably slower than what would be anticipated in a strictly proportional relationship. The system achieves an average CPU and memory consumption overhead profile of 8% and 37% while completing less than one second for all of the validation test runs. The results establish a performance efficiency baseline for a better measure and understanding of the cost of preserving confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) for cloud Consumers and Providers (C&P). Consumers can scrutinize the benefits (i.e., security) and tradeoffs (memory usage, bandwidth, CPU usage, and throughput) and the cost of ensuring CIA can be established, monitored, and controlled. This work provides the primary use-cases, formula for enforcing the rules of data isolation, data tracking policy framework, and the basis for managing confidential data flow and data leak prevention using the CloudMonitor framework.