Energy-Aware Autonomic Framework for Cloud Protection and Self-Healing

Cloud computing technology is being adopted by a growing number of organizations as a way to manage, store and process data. Protecting this infrastructure and key resources such as data and recovering against cyber threats has become a critical concern. At the same time, cloud computing technology such as virtualization and on-demand provisioning can be leveraged to implement protection and recovery mechanisms for sensitive computing services. However, the energy costs of such self-healing mechanisms has been ignored. In this paper, we present a novel IDS-based self-protection mechanism at the virtual machine level inspired by software rejuvenation concepts, and a proof-of-concept prototype built upon state-of-the-art cloud technology. Our empirical evaluation aims at characterizing the cost of the proposed strategy in terms of response time and energy consumption. Preliminary results show a clear correlation between IDS accuracy, attack rate, cloud system workload, energy consumption, and response time.