## 5 Results and Discussions
### Services Attack Model  
In this section we discuss the rising threats and concerns related to multi-cloud and how our proposed technique can overcome these increasing threats and attacks in this domain.  
**Honeypot attacks:** A honey pot is a security breach system projected to mimic a target in a cybersecurity system. A loophole is created in front of the original approach to trap malicious attacker activity; a particular action is taken when an attacker is wholly involved in this copycat system [43]. Our designed system can create these types of honeypots and take appropriate action before accessing the original approach to ensure AAAA in a multi-cloud domain.  
**Dictionary attacks:** Hackers use a list of common words or a dictionary with different combinations multiple times to access the environment. This password-breaking request is useless, as our designed MFA- and SSO-based topology had multifactor and IDP authentication.  
**Brute force attacks:** A list or string of password phrases is applied multiple times to access a designed automated tool with random character sets. MFA and SSO based implementation has a complete barrier to stop these automatic password attacks to avoid stealing access.  
**Traffic interception attack:** Cybercriminal users use automated software such as packet sniffers to access the password between the access and service providers [44]. MFA deployment gets rid of this type of attack as we have multiple authentication and authorization scenarios.  
**Man-in-the-middle attack:** These are sniffers using spoofing tools to access user credentials in an intermediary act. Our designed scheme provides a complete barrier against this type of attack to ensure AAAA in a multi-cloud environment.  
**Key logger attack:** In these attacks, an attacker has software to access keystrokes and log files and to gather useful information from it. Still, SSO implementation ensures avoiding this type of attack due to IDP-based authentication and authorization.  
**Social engineering attacks:** Our proposed scheme helps overcome well-known social engineering attacks like phishing, baiting, and quid quo pro [45], as we have deployed an AAAA environment with multifactor and IDP-based authentication and web authentication is the federated domain's responsibility before entering the host network.  
**Thwarting password attack**: Firm password policy or alphanumeric passwords are not enough these days due to rapid access and the high performance tools available. A single time password is not secure enough to mitigate rising concerns and our current age of such issues [46]. Our designed system ensures multifactor authentication, authorization,  
Figure 5: Authentication, authorization, accountability, and availability (AAAA) comparison of SSO and MFA implementation.  
accountability, and availability. It provides surety to reduce this increasing type of threat of the modern age over the Internet.  
Table 2 describes the complete mechanism of proposed work, the attack surface, and designed metric, and how much it will help to reduce the above listed attacks in a multi-cloud paradigm. Definitions of the terms used in Table 2 are as follows:  
* Attack surface is defined according to the proposed model in multi-cloud.
* Impact in terms of severity level, which causes damage in the environment.
* Designed metrics define the parameters used by the particular technique to overcome the attack.
* Proposed solution is defined as the MFA, SSO, or combination of MFA and SSO deployment.
* The efficacy of the proposed technique to avoid the particular attack in multi-cloud paradigm is defined in terms of the efficiency and cost effectiveness. Efficacy is measured in terms of how the proposed technique justifies and overcome attacks in terms of percentage.