Poster: Multi-Layer Threat Analysis of the Cloud Salman Manzoor Lancaster University United Kingdom s.manzoor1@lancaster.ac.uk Antonios Gouglidis Lancaster University United Kingdom a.gouglidis@lancaster.ac.uk Matthew Bradbury Lancaster University United Kingdom m.s.bradbury@lancaster.ac.uk Neeraj Suri Lancaster University United Kingdom neeraj.suri@lancaster.ac.uk ABSTRACT A variety of Threat Analysis (TA) techniques exist that typically target exploring threats to discrete assets (e.g., services, data, etc.) and reveal potential attacks pertinent to these assets. Furthermore, these techniques assume that the interconnection among the as- sets is static. However, in the Cloud, resources can instantiate or migrate across physical hosts at run-time, thus making the Cloud a dynamic environment. Additionally, the number of attacks target- ing multiple assets/layers emphasizes the need for threat analysis approaches developed for Cloud environments. Therefore, this pro- posal presents a novel threat analysis approach that specifically addresses multi-layer attacks. The proposed approach facilitates threat analysis by developing a technology-agnostic information flow model. It contributes to exploring a threat’s propagation across the operational stack of the Cloud and, consequently, holistically assessing the security of the Cloud. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy →Formal security models; Security services; Information flow control. ACM Reference Format: Salman Manzoor, Antonios Gouglidis, Matthew Bradbury, and Neeraj Suri. 2022. Poster: Multi-Layer Threat Analysis of the Cloud. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’22), November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3563515 1 INTRODUCTION The Cloud offers access to a pool of geo-distributed resources (e.g., network, storage, compute) that can be provisioned dynamically at run-time to satisfy the user/application requirements. Additionally, multiple technologies/services co-exist in the Cloud to provide functionality and flexibility in resource management, making the Cloud a complex environment with a complex threat landscape. This is evidenced by the increasing number of attacks and security breaches targeting the Cloud. For example, some attacks led to the leakage of users’ confidential information [3] while other attacks have targeted the availability of the Cloud [9]. The process of threat analysis is advocated to identify a system’s exposure to threats. Therefore, multiple threat analysis approaches for the Cloud have been proposed to explore threats targeting a Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CCS ’22, November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9450-5/22/11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3563515 specific component in the Cloud [1, 10]. Alternate techniques, such as attack trees/graphs, have also been utilized to explore potential attack paths in the Cloud [2]. Existing approaches perform effective threat analysis [2, 5]. How- ever, they are either limited to identifying threats in the targeted asset or assume that the system under consideration is a static environment. Therefore, the applicability of existing schemes to dy- namic environments, e.g., the Cloud, is hindered due to these limita- tions. We address these challenges by proposing a novel threat anal- ysis approach that facilitates Cloud providers in exploring threats and their propagation, considering the inherent elasticity of the Cloud. Furthermore, the proposed approach