A Scheme for Detecting Intrusions and Minimising Data Loss in Virtual Networks

Cloud computing is an enticing field nowadays due to its cost effective nature, easy accessibility, the pay per use service and shared resources. These shared resources, easy accessibility and shared storage of resources are responsible for putting the confidential information under a great deal of risk. Although the cloud is becoming gigantic day by day but its efficiency is being hampered considerably due to the threats in the cloud computing environment. The threats in the cloud computing environment not only account to external attacks which are launched with the intention of hampering work flow of the cloud provider but the internal attacks also which are being launched so that the efficiency and the reliability of the cloud is at stake. The firewalls monitor traffic between networks such that all the traffic must flow through it, but they are certainly not sufficient to shield the dynamic cloud computing environment from all attacks. They may be able to subvert external attacks to a certain extent but internal attacks do not even pass through the firewalls, therefore rendering them useless. Moreover, attackers exploit vulnerabilities in the virtual machines in order to set up large scale attacks like Ddos. They compromise these VM´s into zombies and the detection of these VM´s is very difficult because cloud users install all types of applications onto their VM´s some of which may be malicious. Thus, the cloud needs stronger security for handling all the intrusions of every scale. An intrusion detection system is presented in the paper which detects the intrusions launched on the VM´s which act an avenue for deploying large scale attacks, therefore, minimising the loss. The IDS presented in the paper is a network IDS and provides security from the IaaS based attacks.