A novel intrusion severity analysis approach for Clouds

Cloud computing presents exciting opportunities to foster research for scientific communities; virtual machine technology has a profound role in this. Among other benefits, virtual machine technology enables Clouds to offer large scale and flexible computing infrastructures that are available on demand to address the diverse requirements of scientific research. However, Clouds introduce novel security challenges which need to be addressed to facilitate widespread adoption. This paper is focused on one such challenge intrusion severity analysis. In particular, we highlight the significance of intrusion severity analysis for the overall security of Clouds. Additionally, we present a novel method to address this challenge in accordance with the specific requirements of Clouds for intrusion severity analysis. We also present rigorous evaluation to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method to address this challenge for Clouds. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.