Security testing in the cloud by means of ethical worm

As Cloud Computing continues to evolve the majority of research tends to lean towards optimising, securing and improving Cloud technologies. Less work appears which leverages the architectural and economic advantages of the Cloud. This paper examines the Cloud as a security testing environment, having a number of purposes such as penetration testing, and the dynamic creation and testing of environments for learning about malicious processes and testing security concepts. A novel experiment into malicious software propagation using ethical worms is developed and tested as a proof of concept to be adopted as a novel approach for security testing in the cloud. The work presented in the paper is unprecedented, to the best of the authors´ knowledge.