A Security Analysis and Assessment for Petri Net-Based OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

Abstract Cloud computing is an important innovation in the current computing model that can provide an easy way to host and manage infrastructure and applications. Accordingly, due to the rapid growth of cloud computing over the past few years, security concerns have been raised. Various methods have been proposed for more security in the use of cloud computing, but not enough efforts have been made to evaluate the above methods. Providing and guaranteeing security as one of the most important open issues in cloud computing has always been the focus of researchers. The cloud service provider must adopt the necessary security strategies to increase the security of service allocation, operation continuity, storage management, information security and privacy protection in order to satisfy and reassure customers. Dealing with the challenges and threats identified in this environment requires providing a basic solution. In this article, infrastructure services as a service in cloud computing are described and the vulnerability of each is analyzed. According to the Petri net modeling tool, a new method to evaluate the security of infrastructure systems as a service is presented and analyzed. In this method, it is tried to be able to analyze the desired service provider and then define it through official models, thus creating an executive model of it, which can be serviced by applying existing security features. He evaluated the intended provider in terms of security and other characteristics. With the help of this method, the level of security of infrastructure systems as a service in cloud computing can be compared and evaluated. Then, using the Petri net modeling tool, one of the famous business systems for providing infrastructure as a service called Openstack is modeled and the behavior of attacks on it is evaluated. Applying the mentioned method on the Openstack system shows that our work has good security and it is expected that researchers, designers and companies providing cloud services will make significant use of the results in order to increase the security of services.