Leveraging the Cloud for Software Security Services.

Abstract

This thesis seeks to leverage the advances in cloud computing in order to address modern security threats, allowing for completely novel architectures that provide dramatic improvements and asymmetric gains beyond what is possible using current approaches. Indeed, many of the critical security problems facing the Internet and its users are inadequately addressed by current security technologies. Current security measures often are deployed in an exclusively network-based or host-based model, limiting their efficacy against modern threats. However, recent advancements in the past decade in cloud computing and high-speed networking have ushered in a new era of software services. Software services that were previously deployed on-premise in organizations and enterprises are now being outsourced to the cloud, leading to fundamentally new models in how software services are sold, consumed, and managed.

This thesis focuses on how novel software security services can be deployed that leverage the cloud to scale elegantly in their capabilities, performance, and management. First, we introduce a novel architecture for malware detection in the cloud. Next, we propose a cloud service to protect modern mobile devices, an ever-increasing target for malicious attackers. Then, we discuss and demonstrate the ability for attackers to leverage the same benefits of cloud-centric services for malicious purposes. Next, we present new techniques for the large-scale analysis and classification of malicious software. Lastly, to demonstrate the benefits of cloud-centric architectures outside the realm of malicious software, we present a threshold signature scheme that leverages the cloud for robustness and resiliency.