TY - GEN A1 - Alibabaie, Najmeh A1 - Ghasemzadeh, Mohammad A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - A variant of genetic algorithm for non-homogeneous population T2 - International Conference Applied Mathematics, Computational Science and Systems Engineering 2016 N2 - Selection of initial points, the number of clusters and finding proper clusters centers are still the main challenge in clustering processes. In this paper, we suggest genetic algorithm based method which searches several solution spaces simultaneously. The solution spaces are population groups consisting of elements with similar structure. Elements in a group have the same size, while elements in different groups are of different sizes. The proposed algorithm processes the population in groups of chromosomes with one gene, two genes to k genes. These genes hold corresponding information about the cluster centers. In the proposed method, the crossover and mutation operators can accept parents with different sizes; this can lead to versatility in population and information transfer among sub-populations. We implemented the proposed method and evaluated its performance against some random datasets and the Ruspini dataset as well. The experimental results show that the proposed method could effectively determine the appropriate number of clusters and recognize their centers. Overall this research implies that using heterogeneous population in the genetic algorithm can lead to better results. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1051/itmconf/20170902001 SN - 2271-2097 VL - 9 PB - EDP Sciences CY - Les Ulis ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gawron, Marian A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - PVD: Passive Vulnerability Detection T2 - 8th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS) N2 - The identification of vulnerabilities relies on detailed information about the target infrastructure. The gathering of the necessary information is a crucial step that requires an intensive scanning or mature expertise and knowledge about the system even though the information was already available in a different context. In this paper we propose a new method to detect vulnerabilities that reuses the existing information and eliminates the necessity of a comprehensive scan of the target system. Since our approach is able to identify vulnerabilities without the additional effort of a scan, we are able to increase the overall performance of the detection. Because of the reuse and the removal of the active testing procedures, our approach could be classified as a passive vulnerability detection. We will explain the approach and illustrate the additional possibility to increase the security awareness of users. Therefore, we applied the approach on an experimental setup and extracted security relevant information from web logs. Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-4243-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/IACS.2017.7921992 SN - 2471-125X SP - 322 EP - 327 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Malchow, Martin A1 - Renz, Jan A1 - Bauer, Matthias A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Embedded smart home BT - remote lab grading in a MOOC with over 6000 participants T2 - 11th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon) N2 - The popularity of MOOCs has increased considerably in the last years. A typical MOOC course consists of video content, self tests after a video and homework, which is normally in multiple choice format. After solving this homeworks for every week of a MOOC, the final exam certificate can be issued when the student has reached a sufficient score. There are also some attempts to include practical tasks, such as programming, in MOOCs for grading. Nevertheless, until now there is no known possibility to teach embedded system programming in a MOOC course where the programming can be done in a remote lab and where grading of the tasks is additionally possible. This embedded programming includes communication over GPIO pins to control LEDs and measure sensor values. We started a MOOC course called "Embedded Smart Home" as a pilot to prove the concept to teach real hardware programming in a MOOC environment under real life MOOC conditions with over 6000 students. Furthermore, also students with real hardware have the possibility to program on their own real hardware and grade their results in the MOOC course. Finally, we evaluate our approach and analyze the student acceptance of this approach to offer a course on embedded programming. We also analyze the hardware usage and working time of students solving tasks to find out if real hardware programming is an advantage and motivating achievement to support students learning success. Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-4623-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/SYSCON.2017.7934728 SN - 1944-7620 SP - 195 EP - 200 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Wilkins, Christian A1 - Hagedorn, Christiane A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - The Gamification of a MOOC Platform T2 - Proceedings of 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have left their mark on the face of education during the recent years. At the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, we are actively developing a MOOC platform, which provides our research with a plethora of e-learning topics, such as learning analytics, automated assessment, peer assessment, team-work, online proctoring, and gamification. We run several instances of this platform. On openHPI, we provide our own courses from within the HPI context. Further instances are openSAP, openWHO, and mooc.HOUSE, which is the smallest of these platforms, targeting customers with a less extensive course portfolio. In 2013, we started to work on the gamification of our platform. By now, we have implemented about two thirds of the features that we initially have evaluated as useful for our purposes. About a year ago we activated the implemented gamification features on mooc.HOUSE. Before activating the features on openHPI as well, we examined, and re-evaluated our initial considerations based on the data we collected so far and the changes in other contexts of our platforms. KW - MOOC KW - Gamification KW - e-learning KW - Massive Open Online Courses Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-5467-1 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2017.7942952 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 883 EP - 892 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Leveraging cloud native design patterns for security-as-a-service applications T2 - IEEE International Conference on Smart Cloud (SmartCloud) N2 - This paper discusses a new approach for designing and deploying Security-as-a-Service (SecaaS) applications using cloud native design patterns. Current SecaaS approaches do not efficiently handle the increasing threats to computer systems and applications. For example, requests for security assessments drastically increase after a high-risk security vulnerability is disclosed. In such scenarios, SecaaS applications are unable to dynamically scale to serve requests. A root cause of this challenge is employment of architectures not specifically fitted to cloud environments. Cloud native design patterns resolve this challenge by enabling certain properties e.g. massive scalability and resiliency via the combination of microservice patterns and cloud-focused design patterns. However adopting these patterns is a complex process, during which several security issues are introduced. In this work, we investigate these security issues, we redesign and deploy a monolithic SecaaS application using cloud native design patterns while considering appropriate, layered security counter-measures i.e. at the application and cloud networking layer. Our prototype implementation out-performs traditional, monolithic applications with an average Scanner Time of 6 minutes, without compromising security. Our approach can be employed for designing secure, scalable and performant SecaaS applications that effectively handle unexpected increase in security assessment requests. KW - Cloud-Security KW - Security-as-a-Service KW - Vulnerability Assessment KW - Cloud Native Applications Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5386-3684-8 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/SmartCloud.2017.21 SP - 90 EP - 97 PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Renz, Jan A1 - Shams, Ahmed A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Offline-Enabled Web-based E-Learning for Improved User Experience in Africa T2 - 2017 IEEE Africon N2 - Web-based E-Learning uses Internet technologies and digital media to deliver education content to learners. Many universities in recent years apply their capacity in producing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). They have been offering MOOCs with an expectation of rendering a comprehensive online apprenticeship. Typically, an online content delivery process requires an Internet connection. However, access to the broadband has never been a readily available resource in many regions. In Africa, poor and no networks are yet predominantly experienced by Internet users, frequently causing offline each moment a digital device disconnect from a network. As a result, a learning process is always disrupted, delayed and terminated in such regions. This paper raises the concern of E-Learning in poor and low bandwidths, in fact, it highlights the needs for an Offline-Enabled mode. The paper also explores technical approaches beamed to enhance the user experience inWeb-based E-Learning, particular in Africa. KW - Educational Technology KW - E-Learning KW - Internet KW - Bandwidth KW - Mobile Learning KW - Mobiles KW - MOOC KW - Offline-Enabled KW - Ubiquitous Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5386-2775-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/AFRCON.2017.8095574 SN - 2153-0025 SP - 736 EP - 742 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Perlich, Anja A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Cooperative Note-Taking in Psychotherapy Sessions BT - an evaluation of the T2 - 2018 IEEE 20th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom) N2 - In the course of patient treatments, psychotherapists aim to meet the challenges of being both a trusted, knowledgeable conversation partner and a diligent documentalist. We are developing the digital whiteboard system Tele-Board MED (TBM), which allows the therapist to take digital notes during the session together with the patient. This study investigates what therapists are experiencing when they document with TBM in patient sessions for the first time and whether this documentation saves them time when writing official clinical documents. As the core of this study, we conducted four anamnesis session dialogues with behavior psychotherapists and volunteers acting in the role of patients. Following a mixed-method approach, the data collection and analysis involved self-reported emotion samples, user experience curves and questionnaires. We found that even in the very first patient session with TBM, therapists come to feel comfortable, develop a positive feeling and can concentrate on the patient. Regarding administrative documentation tasks, we found with the TBM report generation feature the therapists save 60% of the time they normally spend on writing case reports to the health insurance. KW - user experience KW - emotion measurement KW - computer-mediated therapy KW - behavior psychotherapy KW - human-computer interaction KW - medical documentation KW - note-taking Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-4294-8 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gawron, Marian A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Automatic vulnerability classification using machine learning T2 - Risks and Security of Internet and Systems N2 - The classification of vulnerabilities is a fundamental step to derive formal attributes that allow a deeper analysis. Therefore, it is required that this classification has to be performed timely and accurate. Since the current situation demands a manual interaction in the classification process, the timely processing becomes a serious issue. Thus, we propose an automated alternative to the manual classification, because the amount of identified vulnerabilities per day cannot be processed manually anymore. We implemented two different approaches that are able to automatically classify vulnerabilities based on the vulnerability description. We evaluated our approaches, which use Neural Networks and the Naive Bayes methods respectively, on the base of publicly known vulnerabilities. KW - Vulnerability analysis KW - Security analytics KW - Data mining Machine learning KW - Neural Networks Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-76687-4 SN - 978-3-319-76686-7 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76687-4_1 SN - 0302-9743 SN - 1611-3349 SP - 3 EP - 17 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bauer, Matthias A1 - Malchow, Martin A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Improving access to online lecture videos T2 - Proceedings of 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - In university teaching today, it is common practice to record regular lectures and special events such as conferences and speeches. With these recordings, a large fundus of video teaching material can be created quickly and easily. Typically, lectures have a length of about one and a half hours and usually take place once or twice a week based on the credit hours. Depending on the number of lectures and other events recorded, the number of recordings available is increasing rapidly, which means that an appropriate form of provisioning is essential for the students. This is usually done in the form of lecture video platforms. In this work, we have investigated how lecture video platforms and the contained knowledge can be improved and accessed more easily by an increasing number of students. We came up with a multistep process we have applied to our own lecture video web portal that can be applied to other solutions as well. KW - E-Learning KW - Lecture Video Archive KW - E-Lecture KW - Lecture Recording KW - HTML5 KW - HLS KW - Flash Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-2957-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2018.8363361 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 1161 EP - 1168 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Malchow, Martin A1 - Bauer, Matthias A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Embedded smart home — remote lab MOOC with optional real hardware experience for over 4000 students T2 - Proceedings of 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) become more and more popular for learners of all ages to study further or to learn new subjects of interest. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a different MOOC course style. Typically, video content is shown teaching the student new information. After watching a video, self-test questions can be answered. Finally, the student answers weekly exams and final exams like the self test questions. Out of the points that have been scored for weekly and final exams a certificate can be issued. Our approach extends the possibility to receive points for the final score with practical programming exercises on real hardware. It allows the student to do embedded programming by communicating over GPIO pins to control LEDs and measure sensor values. Additionally, they can visualize values on an embedded display using web technologies, which are an essential part of embedded and smart home devices to communicate with common APIs. Students have the opportunity to solve all tasks within the online remote lab and at home on the same kind of hardware. The evaluation of this MOOCs indicates the interesting design for students to learn an engineering technique with new technology approaches in an appropriate, modern, supporting and motivating way of teaching. KW - E-Learning KW - MOOC Remote Lab KW - Distance Learning KW - Embedded Programming KW - Smart Home Education Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-2957-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2018.8363353 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 1104 EP - 1111 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Malchow, Martin A1 - Bauer, Matthias A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Enhance Learning in a Video Lecture Archive with Annotations T2 - Proceedings of OF 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - When students watch learning videos online, they usually need to watch several hours of video content. In the end, not every minute of a video is relevant for the exam. Additionally, students need to add notes to clarify issues of a lecture. There are several possibilities to enhance the metadata of a video, e.g. a typical way to add user-specific information to an online video is a comment functionality, which allows users to share their thoughts and questions with the public. In contrast to common video material which can be found online, lecture videos are used for exam preparation. Due to this difference, the idea comes up to annotate lecture videos with markers and personal notes for a better understanding of the taught content. Especially, students learning for an exam use their notes to refresh their memories. To ease this learning method with lecture videos, we introduce the annotation feature in our video lecture archive. This functionality supports the students with keeping track of their thoughts by providing an intuitive interface to easily add, modify or remove their ideas. This annotation function is integrated in the video player. Hence, scrolling to a separate annotation area on the website is not necessary. Furthermore, the annotated notes can be exported together with the slide content to a PDF file, which can then be printed easily. Lecture video annotations support and motivate students to learn and watch videos from an E-Learning video archive. KW - E-Learning KW - Lecture Video Archive KW - Video annotations KW - E-Learning exam preparation Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-2957-4 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 849 EP - 856 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Meinig, Michael A1 - Kayem, Anne V. D. M. A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph A1 - Graupner, Hendrik T1 - Securing cloud storage brokerage systems through threat models T2 - Proceedings IEEE 32nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA) N2 - Cloud storage brokerage is an abstraction aimed at providing value-added services. However, Cloud Service Brokers are challenged by several security issues including enlarged attack surfaces due to integration of disparate components and API interoperability issues. Therefore, appropriate security risk assessment methods are required to identify and evaluate these security issues, and examine the efficiency of countermeasures. A possible approach for satisfying these requirements is employment of threat modeling concepts, which have been successfully applied in traditional paradigms. In this work, we employ threat models including attack trees, attack graphs and Data Flow Diagrams against a Cloud Service Broker (CloudRAID) and analyze these security threats and risks. Furthermore, we propose an innovative technique for combining Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Common Configuration Scoring System (CCSS) base scores in probabilistic attack graphs to cater for configuration-based vulnerabilities which are typically leveraged for attacking cloud storage systems. This approach is necessary since existing schemes do not provide sufficient security metrics, which are imperatives for comprehensive risk assessments. We demonstrate the efficiency of our proposal by devising CCSS base scores for two common attacks against cloud storage: Cloud Storage Enumeration Attack and Cloud Storage Exploitation Attack. These metrics are then used in Attack Graph Metric-based risk assessment. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach caters for the aforementioned gaps and provides efficient security hardening options. Therefore, our proposals can be employed to improve cloud security. KW - Cloud-Security KW - Threat Models KW - Security Metrics KW - Security Risk Assessment KW - Secure Configuration Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-2195-0 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/AINA.2018.00114 SN - 1550-445X SP - 759 EP - 768 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Krentz, Konrad-Felix A1 - Meinel, Christoph A1 - Graupner, Hendrik T1 - More Lightweight, yet Stronger 802.15.4 Security Through an Intra-layer Optimization T2 - Foundations and Practice of Security N2 - 802.15.4 security protects against the replay, injection, and eavesdropping of 802.15.4 frames. A core concept of 802.15.4 security is the use of frame counters for both nonce generation and anti-replay protection. While being functional, frame counters (i) cause an increased energy consumption as they incur a per-frame overhead of 4 bytes and (ii) only provide sequential freshness. The Last Bits (LB) optimization does reduce the per-frame overhead of frame counters, yet at the cost of an increased RAM consumption and occasional energy-and time-consuming resynchronization actions. Alternatively, the timeslotted channel hopping (TSCH) media access control (MAC) protocol of 802.15.4 avoids the drawbacks of frame counters by replacing them with timeslot indices, but findings of Yang et al. question the security of TSCH in general. In this paper, we assume the use of ContikiMAC, which is a popular asynchronous MAC protocol for 802.15.4 networks. Under this assumption, we propose an Intra-Layer Optimization for 802.15.4 Security (ILOS), which intertwines 802.15.4 security and ContikiMAC. In effect, ILOS reduces the security-related per-frame overhead even more than the LB optimization, as well as achieves strong freshness. Furthermore, unlike the LB optimization, ILOS neither incurs an increased RAM consumption nor requires resynchronization actions. Beyond that, ILOS integrates with and advances other security supplements to ContikiMAC. We implemented ILOS using OpenMotes and the Contiki operating system. Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-75650-9 SN - 978-3-319-75649-3 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75650-9_12 SN - 0302-9743 SN - 1611-3349 VL - 10723 SP - 173 EP - 188 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - GEN A1 - Shaabani, Nuhad A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Improving the efficiency of inclusion dependency detection T2 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management N2 - The detection of all inclusion dependencies (INDs) in an unknown dataset is at the core of any data profiling effort. Apart from the discovery of foreign key relationships, INDs can help perform data integration, integrity checking, schema (re-)design, and query optimization. With the advent of Big Data, the demand increases for efficient INDs discovery algorithms that can scale with the input data size. To this end, we propose S-INDD++ as a scalable system for detecting unary INDs in large datasets. S-INDD++ applies a new stepwise partitioning technique that helps discard a large number of attributes in early phases of the detection by processing the first partitions of smaller sizes. S-INDD++ also extends the concept of the attribute clustering to decide which attributes to be discarded based on the clustering result of each partition. Moreover, in contrast to the state-of-the-art, S-INDD++ does not require the partition to fit into the main memory-which is a highly appreciable property in the face of the ever growing datasets. We conducted an exhaustive evaluation of S-INDD++ by applying it to large datasets with thousands attributes and more than 266 million tuples. The results show the high superiority of S-INDD++ over the state-of-the-art. S-INDD++ reduced up to 50 % of the runtime in comparison with BINDER, and up to 98 % in comparison with S-INDD. KW - Algorithms KW - Data partitioning KW - Data profiling KW - Data mining Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-4503-6014-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3269206.3271724 SP - 207 EP - 216 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Elsaid, Mohamed Esam A1 - Shawish, Ahmed A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Enhanced cost analysis of multiple virtual machines live migration in VMware environments T2 - 2018 IEEE 8th International Symposium on Cloud and Service Computing (SC2) N2 - Live migration is an important feature in modern software-defined datacenters and cloud computing environments. Dynamic resource management, load balance, power saving and fault tolerance are all dependent on the live migration feature. Despite the importance of live migration, the cost of live migration cannot be ignored and may result in service availability degradation. Live migration cost includes the migration time, downtime, CPU overhead, network and power consumption. There are many research articles that discuss the problem of live migration cost with different scopes like analyzing the cost and relate it to the parameters that control it, proposing new migration algorithms that minimize the cost and also predicting the migration cost. For the best of our knowledge, most of the papers that discuss the migration cost problem focus on open source hypervisors. For the research articles focus on VMware environments, none of the published articles proposed migration time, network overhead and power consumption modeling for single and multiple VMs live migration. In this paper, we propose empirical models for the live migration time, network overhead and power consumption for single and multiple VMs migration. The proposed models are obtained using a VMware based testbed. Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-7281-0236-8 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/SC2.2018.00010 SP - 16 EP - 23 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bin Tareaf, Raad A1 - Berger, Philipp A1 - Hennig, Patrick A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Personality exploration system for online social networks BT - Facebook brands as a use case T2 - 2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) N2 - User-generated content on social media platforms is a rich source of latent information about individual variables. Crawling and analyzing this content provides a new approach for enterprises to personalize services and put forward product recommendations. In the past few years, brands made a gradual appearance on social media platforms for advertisement, customers support and public relation purposes and by now it became a necessity throughout all branches. This online identity can be represented as a brand personality that reflects how a brand is perceived by its customers. We exploited recent research in text analysis and personality detection to build an automatic brand personality prediction model on top of the (Five-Factor Model) and (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) features extracted from publicly available benchmarks. The proposed model reported significant accuracy in predicting specific personality traits form brands. For evaluating our prediction results on actual brands, we crawled the Facebook API for 100k posts from the most valuable brands' pages in the USA and we visualize exemplars of comparison results and present suggestions for future directions. KW - Big Five Model KW - Brand Personality KW - Personality Prediction KW - Machine Learning KW - Social Media Analysis Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-5386-7325-6 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/WI.2018.00-76 SP - 301 EP - 309 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Kayem, Anne Voluntas dei Massah A1 - Meinel, Christoph A1 - Wolthusen, Stephen D. T1 - Smart micro-grid systems security and privacy preface T2 - Smart micro-grid systems security and privacy N2 - Studies indicate that reliable access to power is an important enabler for economic growth. To this end, modern energy management systems have seen a shift from reliance on time-consuming manual procedures , to highly automated management , with current energy provisioning systems being run as cyber-physical systems . Operating energy grids as a cyber-physical system offers the advantage of increased reliability and dependability , but also raises issues of security and privacy. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the contents of this book showing the interrelation between the topics of the chapters in terms of smart energy provisioning. We begin by discussing the concept of smart-grids in general, proceeding to narrow our focus to smart micro-grids in particular. Lossy networks also provide an interesting framework for enabling the implementation of smart micro-grids in remote/rural areas, where deploying standard smart grids is economically and structurally infeasible. To this end, we consider an architectural design for a smart micro-grid suited to low-processing capable devices. We model malicious behaviour, and propose mitigation measures based properties to distinguish normal from malicious behaviour . Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-91427-5 SN - 978-3-319-91426-8 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91427-5_1 VL - 71 SP - VII EP - VIII PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sianipar, Johannes Harungguan A1 - Willems, Christian A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Virtual machine integrity verification in Crowd-Resourcing Virtual Laboratory T2 - 2018 IEEE 11th Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA) N2 - In cloud computing, users are able to use their own operating system (OS) image to run a virtual machine (VM) on a remote host. The virtual machine OS is started by the user using some interfaces provided by a cloud provider in public or private cloud. In peer to peer cloud, the VM is started by the host admin. After the VM is running, the user could get a remote access to the VM to install, configure, and run services. For the security reasons, the user needs to verify the integrity of the running VM, because a malicious host admin could modify the image or even replace the image with a similar image, to be able to get sensitive data from the VM. We propose an approach to verify the integrity of a running VM on a remote host, without using any specific hardware such as Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Our approach is implemented on a Linux platform where the kernel files (vmlinuz and initrd) could be replaced with new files, while the VM is running. kexec is used to reboot the VM with the new kernel files. The new kernel has secret codes that will be used to verify whether the VM was started using the new kernel files. The new kernel is used to further measuring the integrity of the running VM. KW - Virtual Machine KW - Integrity Verification KW - Crowd-Resourcing KW - Cloud Computing Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-5386-9133-5 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCA.2018.00032 SN - 2163-2871 SP - 169 EP - 176 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sianipar, Johannes Harungguan A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Moving sensitive data against live memory dumping, spectre and meltdown attacks T2 - 26th International Conference on Systems Engineering (ICSEng) N2 - The emergence of cloud computing allows users to easily host their Virtual Machines with no up-front investment and the guarantee of always available anytime anywhere. But with the Virtual Machine (VM) is hosted outside of user's premise, the user loses the physical control of the VM as it could be running on untrusted host machines in the cloud. Malicious host administrator could launch live memory dumping, Spectre, or Meltdown attacks in order to extract sensitive information from the VM's memory, e.g. passwords or cryptographic keys of applications running in the VM. In this paper, inspired by the moving target defense (MTD) scheme, we propose a novel approach to increase the security of application's sensitive data in the VM by continuously moving the sensitive data among several memory allocations (blocks) in Random Access Memory (RAM). A movement function is added into the application source code in order for the function to be running concurrently with the application's main function. Our approach could reduce the possibility of VM's sensitive data in the memory to be leaked into memory dump file by 2 5% and secure the sensitive data from Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Our approach's overhead depends on the number and the size of the sensitive data. KW - Virtual Machine KW - Memory Dumping KW - Security KW - Cloud Computing KW - Spectre KW - Meltdown Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-5386-7834-3 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Torkura, Kennedy A. A1 - Sukmana, Muhammad Ihsan Haikal A1 - Kayem, Anne V. D. M. A1 - Cheng, Feng A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - A cyber risk based moving target defense mechanism for microservice architectures T2 - IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Ubiquitous Computing & Communications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Social Computing & Networking, Sustainable Computing & Communications (ISPA/IUCC/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom) N2 - Microservice Architectures (MSA) structure applications as a collection of loosely coupled services that implement business capabilities. The key advantages of MSA include inherent support for continuous deployment of large complex applications, agility and enhanced productivity. However, studies indicate that most MSA are homogeneous, and introduce shared vulnerabilites, thus vulnerable to multi-step attacks, which are economics-of-scale incentives to attackers. In this paper, we address the issue of shared vulnerabilities in microservices with a novel solution based on the concept of Moving Target Defenses (MTD). Our mechanism works by performing risk analysis against microservices to detect and prioritize vulnerabilities. Thereafter, security risk-oriented software diversification is employed, guided by a defined diversification index. The diversification is performed at runtime, leveraging both model and template based automatic code generation techniques to automatically transform programming languages and container images of the microservices. Consequently, the microservices attack surfaces are altered thereby introducing uncertainty for attackers while reducing the attackability of the microservices. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our solution, with an average success rate of over 70% attack surface randomization. KW - Security Risk Assessment KW - Security Metrics KW - Moving Target Defense KW - Microservices Security KW - Application Container Security Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-7281-1141-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/BDCloud.2018.00137 SN - 2158-9178 SP - 932 EP - 939 PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers CY - Los Alamitos ER -