Towards Abuse Detection and Prevention in IaaS Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is frequently being used to host online services. Abuse of cloud resources poses an important problem for cloud service providers. If third parties are affected by abuse, bad publicity or legal liabilities may ensue for the provider. There is an unsatisfactory level of protection against abuse of cloud offerings at the moment. In this paper, we analyse the current state of abuse detection and prevention in IaaS cloud computing. To establish what constitutes abuse in an IaaS environment, a survey of acceptable use policies of cloud service providers was conducted. We have found that existing intrusion detection and prevention techniques are only of limited use in this environment due to the high level of control that users can exercise over their resources. However, cloud computing opens up different opportunities for intrusion detection. We present possible approaches for abuse detection, which we plan to investigate further in future work.