Providing context-based visibility of cloud resources in a multi-tenant environment

• US 9,444,820 B2
• Filed: 09/30/2014
• Issued: 09/13/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 01/16/2014
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Muppidi, Sridhar R., Bird, William Alexander, Iyer, Sreekanth Ramakrishna, Kumar, Archana, Nagaratnam, Nataraj
• Primary Examiner(s): ZHAO, DON GORDON
• Application Number:
  US14/503,091
• Publication Number:
  US 20150200958A1
• Time in Patent Office: 714 Days
• Field of Search: 709/203, 709/224, 709/226
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/28 Restricting access to network management systems or functions, e.g. using authorisation function to access network configuration
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/50 Network service management, e.g. ensuring proper service fulfilment according to agreements
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/70 Admission control; Resource allocation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/78 Architectures of resource allocation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/10 for controlling access to devices or network resources
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/102 Entity profiles
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/1433 Vulnerability analysis
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/1441 Countermeasures against malicious traffic countermeasures against attacks on cryptographic mechanisms H04L9/002
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/20 for managing network security; network security policies in general filtering policies H04L63/0227

Abstract

A secure tag generation service is associated with a cloud infrastructure. This service establishes a security context for a particular cloud tenant based on a tenant'"'"'s security requirements, one or more cloud resource attributes, and the like. The security content is encoded into a data structure, such as a tag that uniquely identifies that security context. The tag is then encrypted. The encrypted tag is then propagated to one or more cloud management services, such as a logging service. When one or more cloud resources are then used, such use is associated with the encrypted security context tag. In this manner, the encrypted tag is used to monitor activities that are required to meet the security context. When it comes time to perform a security or compliance management task, any cloud system logs that reference the encrypted security context tag are correlated to generate a report for the security context.

Claims

1. A method of resource security and compliance monitoring in a multi-tenant cloud computing infrastructure, the cloud computing infrastructure comprising a set of network-accessible computing machines and software executed by one or more processors in the cloud computing infrastructure, comprising:

for a given tenant, deriving a security context from cloud resource meta-data and user-specific input data, the user-specific input data being security requirements for the given tenant in the cloud computing infrastructure;

encapsulating the cloud resource meta-data and the user-specific input data into a data structure;

processing the data structure into a data string that securely and uniquely represents the security context for the given tenant;

propagating the data string for the given tenant into machine-based logs generated by one or more cloud resource automation services that monitor the cloud computing infrastructure;

associating the data string to activities associated with one or more secure resources as the activities are monitored by the one or more cloud resource automation services to provide context-based visibility for the resource security and compliance monitoring in the cloud computing infrastructure by the one or more cloud resource automation services; and

responsive to a request associated with the resource security and compliance monitoring, correlating information from the machine-based logs and that includes the data string to generate a security context-specific response, the security context-specific response associated with a tenant-specific compliance view;

wherein operations of the processing, the propagating and the correlating are carried out by the one or more processors.

2. The method as described in claim 1 wherein the data string is a security context tag that encodes the cloud resource meta-data and the user-specific input data.

3. The method as described in claim 2 wherein the data string is protected by a security wrapper generated by applying a given mathematical function to the security context tag.

4. The method as described in claim 3 further including removing the security wrapper prior to correlating the information.

5. The method as described in claim 1 further including updating the security context and the associated data string based on one of:

a runtime behavior, and an event.

6. The method as described in claim 1 wherein the security context-specific response is a report detailing one of:

user activity, resource usage, network monitoring, and workload execution.

7. The method as described in claim 6 wherein the report is specific to the given tenant and the security context for the given tenant.