Open-source cloud platforms provide a feasible alternative of deploying cloud computing in low-cost commodity hardware and operating systems. To enhance the reliability of an open-source cloud, we design and implement CloudVS, a practical add-on system that enables version control for virtual machines (VMs). CloudVS targets a commodity cloud platform that has limited available resources. It exploits content similarities across different VM versions using redundancy elimination (RE), such that only non-redundant data chunks of a VM version are transmitted over the network and kept in persistent storage. Using RE as a building block, we propose a suite of performance adaptation mechanisms that make CloudVS amenable to different commodity settings. Specifically, we propose a tunable mechanism to balance the storage and disk seek overheads, as well as various I/O optimization techniques to minimize the interferences to other co-resident processes. We further exploit a higher degree of content similarity by applying RE to multiple VM images simultaneously, and support the copy-on-write image format. Using real-world VM snapshots, we experiment CloudVS in an open-source cloud testbed built on Eucalyptus. We demonstrate how CloudVS can be parameterized to balance the performance trade-offs between version control and normal VM operations.

Web applications require exchanging parameters between a client and a server to function properly. In real-world systems such as online banking transfer, traversing multiple pages with parameters contributed by both the user and server is a must, and hence the applications have to enforce workflow and parameter dependency controls across multiple requests. An application that applies insufficient server-side input validations is however vulnerable to parameter tampering attacks, which manipulate the exchanged parameters. Existing fuzzing-based scanning approaches however neglected these important controls, and this caused their fuzzing requests to be dropped before they can reach any vulnerable code. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to identify the workflow and parameter dependent constraints, which are then maintained and leveraged for automatic detection of server acceptances during fuzzing. We realized the approach by building a generic blackbox parameter tampering scanner. It successfully uncovered a number of severe vulnerabilities, including one from the largest multi-national banking website, which other scanners miss.

Open-source cloud platforms provide a feasible alternative of deploying cloud computing in low-cost commodity hardware and operating systems. To enhance the reliability of an open-source cloud, we propose CloudVS, an add-on system that enables version control for virtual machines (VMs). CloudVS targets a commodity cloud platform that has limited available resources. It exploits content similarities across different VM versions using redundancy elimination (RE), such that only non-redundant data chunks of a VM version are transmitted over the network and kept in persistent storage. Using RE as a building block, we propose a suite of performance adaptation mechanisms that make CloudVS amenable to different commodity settings. Specifically, we propose a tunable mechanism to balance the storage and disk seek overheads, as well as various I/O optimization techniques to minimize the interferences to other coresident processes. Using a 3-month span of real VM snapshots, we experiment CloudVS in an open-source cloud testbed built on Eucalyptus. We demonstrate how CloudVS leverages RE to save the storage cost and the VM operation time than simply keeping full VM images. More importantly, we show how CloudVS can be parameterized to balance the performance trade-offs between version control and normal VM operations.

The probabilistic packet marking (PPM) algorithm is a promising way to discover the Internet map or an attack graph that the attack packets traversed during a distributed denial-of-service attack. However, the PPM algorithm is not perfect, as its termination condition is not well defined in the literature. More importantly, without a proper termination condition, the attack graph constructed by the PPM algorithm would be wrong. In this work, we provide a precise termination condition for the PPM algorithm and name the new algorithm the rectified PPM (RPPM) algorithm. The most significant merit of the RPPM algorithm is that when the algorithm terminates, the algorithm guarantees that the constructed attack graph is correct, with a specified level of confidence. We carry out simulations on the RPPM algorithm and show that the RPPM algorithm can guarantee the correctness of the constructed attack graph under 1) different probabilities that a router marks the attack packets and 2) different structures of the network graph. The RPPM algorithm provides an autonomous way for the original PPM algorithm to determine its termination, and it is a promising means of enhancing the reliability of the PPM algorithm.

Distributed denial-of-service attack is one of the most pressing security problems that the Internet community needs to address. Two major requirements for effective traceback are (i) to quickly and accurately locate potential attackers and (ii) to filter attack packets so that a host can resume the normal service to legitimate clients. Most of the existing IP traceback techniques focus on tracking the location of attackers after-the-fact. In this work, we provide an efficient methodology for locating potential attackers who employ the flood-based attack. We propose a distributed algorithm so that a set of routers can correctly (in a distributed sense) gather statistics in a coordinated fashion and that a victim site can deduce the local traffic intensities of all these participating routers. We prove the correctness of our distributed algorithm, and given the collected statistics, we provide a method for the victim site to locate attackers who sent out dominating flows of packets. The proposed distributed traceback methodology can also complement and leverage on the existing ICMP traceback so that a more efficient and accurate traceback can be obtained. We carry out simulations to illustrate that the proposed methodology can locate the attackers in a short period of time. Moreover, the applications as well as the limitations of the proposed methodology are covered. We believe this work also provides the theoretical foundation on how to correctly and accurately perform distributed measurement and traffic estimation on the Internet.