Detection and Security: Achieving Resiliency by Dynamic and Passive System Monitoring and Smart Access Control

In this chapter, we discuss methods to address some of the challenges in achieving resilient cloud computing. The issues and potential solutions are brought about by examples of (i) active and passive monitoring as a way to provide situational awareness about a system and users' state and behavior; (ii) automated reasoning about system/application state based on observations from monitoring tools; (iii) coordination of monitoring and system activities to provide a robust response to accidental failures and malicious attacks; and (iv) use of smart access control methods to reduce the attack surface and limit the likelihood of an unauthorized access to the system. Case studies covering different application domains, for example, cloud computing, large computing infrastructure for scientific applications, and industrial control systems, are used to show both the practicality of the proposed approaches and their capabilities, for example, in terms of detection coverage and performance cost.