CloudHoneyCY - An Integrated Honeypot Framework for Cloud Infrastructures

Security issues and challenges constitute, undoubtedly, one of the major risks of using cloud computing services. There are approaches that address security requirements, nevertheless there are no guarantees that security breaches are not going to occur in this complex infrastructure. Coordinated and sophisticated attacks pose a significant threat to cloud environments and vendors need to be prepared to prevent, detect, and recover from them. In this paper, the focus of the discussion is on how honeypots, a nontraditional security technology not adequately represented in the protection mechanisms pool, could be deployed in the cloud to allow the analysis of attack patterns. To be more specific, CloudHoneyCY is presented, an open-source framework that supports a collection of low-interaction and high-interaction honeypots deployed in the cloud infrastructure with the purpose of collecting and analyzing attack data that aids in constructing attack profiles.