Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Moving Target Defense in Distributed Systems

Sammanfattning

Cloud computing has recently become increasingly popular for server hosting. Additionally,a new model of cloud computing has emerged where cloud resources areplaced at the edge of the network closer to the user. Both cloud and edge systemsshare many common security concerns, however, edge systems may suffer an increasedrisk of physical tampering and destruction. One way to harden the securityin both cloud and edge systems is to use a technique called Moving Target Defense.The technique can be likened to the idea of frequency hopping in secure communicationsystems. Moving Target Defense is not yet widely adopted by industry andthe current research in the area is very limited. Additionally, to our knowledge,there are no open-source implementations that can be easily replicated. The MovingTarget Defense proposed in this thesis is an open-source implementation andcan move a critical application between virtual and physical nodes in order to avoidand confuse adversaries. In addition to the implementation, we performed security,availability, and performance tests on the system. The results show that our systemis able to successfully thwart some types of attacks while not significantly impactingavailability and performance.