ISSF: An Intelligent Security Service Framework for Cloud-native Operations

Authors

  • Yikuan Yan School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
  • Keman Huang School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China ,Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  • Michael Siegel Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.2447

Keywords:

Cloud-native, dynamic attack graph, intelligent security service model, security service training, publishing and evaluating

Abstract

The growing system complexity of microservice architectures and the bilateral enhancement of artificial intelligence (AI) for both attackers and defenders present increasing security challenges for cloud-native operations. In particular, cloud-native operators require a holistic view of the dynamic security posture for the microservice-based cloud-native environment from a defense aspect. Additionally, both attackers and defenders can adopt advanced AI technologies. This makes the dynamic interaction and benchmark among different intelligent offense and defense strategies more crucial. Hence, following the multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm, this research develops an agent-based intelligent security service framework (ISSF) for cloud-native operations. It includes a dynamic attack graph model to represent the cloud-native environment and an action model to represent offense and defense actions. Then we develop an approach to enable the training, publishing, and evaluating of intelligent security services using diverse deep RL algorithms and training strategies, facilitating their systematic development and benchmarking. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can sufficiently model the security posture of a cloud-native system for defenders, effectively develop and quantitatively benchmark different intelligent security services for both attackers and defenders, and guide further optimization.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Yikuan Yan, School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

Yikuan Yan received his Bachelor degree in information security in 2023 from the Central University of Finance and Economics, China. He is currently pursuing his Master’s degree at the School of Information, Remin University of China, China. His research interests include autonomous cyber operation and multi-agents system.

Keman Huang, School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China ,Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Keman Huang is an Associate Professor at the Renmin University of China and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He uses data-driven empirical study and simulation to work on cybersecurity behavior, policy and strategy, service innovation ecosystems for cutting edge technologies including AI and Blockchain. He has published more than 70 articles in top journals, conferences and magazines, including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, ACM computing surveys, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and International Conference on Web Services.

Michael Siegel, Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Michael Siegelis a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and also the Director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS). Siegel’s research focuses on the management, strategy, technology, and organizational issues related to cybersecurity with specific interest in vulnerability markets, cyber risk management, dark web business models, IoT endpoint security, vulnerability management, cybersecurity workforce development, and educating management in cybersecurity. He also has done research in the intelligent integration of information systems, risk management, insurgency and state stability, data analytics, healthcare systems, and systems modeling. Siegel has published articles on such topics as simulation modeling for cyber resilience, cyber vulnerability markets, AI and cybersecurity, data management strategy, architecture for practical metadata integration, heterogeneous database systems, and managing and valuing a corporate IT portfolio using dynamic modeling of software development and maintenance processes. His research at MIT has continued for over 35 years and includes a wide range of publications, patents and teaching accomplishments.

References

Bushra A Alahmadi, Louise Axon, and Ivan Martinovic. 99% false positives: A qualitative study of SOC analysts’ perspectives on security alarms. In 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22), pages 2783–2800, 2022.

Mazhar Ali, Samee U Khan, and Athanasios V Vasilakos. Security in cloud computing: Opportunities and challenges. Information sciences, 305:357–383, 2015.

Nuha Alshuqayran, Nour Ali, and Roger Evans. A systematic mapping study in microservice architecture. In 2016 IEEE 9th international conference on service-oriented computing and applications (SOCA), pages 44–51. IEEE, 2016.

Alex Andrew, Sam Spillard, Joshua Collyer, and Neil Dhir. Developing optimal causal cyber-defence agents via cyber security simulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.12355, 2022.

Andy Applebaum, Camron Dennler, Patrick Dwyer, Marina Moskowitz, Harold Nguyen, Nicole Nichols, Nicole Park, Paul Rachwalski, Frank Rau, Adrian Webster, et al. Bridging automated to autonomous cyber defense: Foundational analysis of tabular q-learning. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security, pages 149–159, 2022.

Arunkumar Arulappan, Aniket Mahanti, Kalpdrum Passi, Thiruvenkadam Srinivasan, Ranesh Naha, and Gunasekaran Raja. Dqn approach for adaptive self-healing of vnfs in cloud-native network. IEEE Access, 12:34489–34504, 2024.

Shmulik Barlev, Z Basil, S Kohanim, Ron Peleg, S Regev, and Alexandra Shulman-Peleg. Secure yet usable: Protecting servers and linux containers. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 60(4):12–1, 2016.

Mohamad Mulham Belal and Divya Meena Sundaram. Comprehensive review on intelligent security defences in cloud: Taxonomy, security issues, ml/dl techniques, challenges and future trends. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 34(10):9102–9131, 2022.

André Carrusca, Maria Cecília Gomes, and João Leitão. Microservices management on cloud/edge environments. In Service-Oriented Computing–ICSOC 2019 Workshops: WESOACS, ASOCA, ISYCC, TBCE, and STRAPS, Toulouse, France, October 28–31, 2019, Revised Selected Papers 17, pages 95–108. Springer, 2020.

Shuiguang Deng, Hailiang Zhao, Binbin Huang, Cheng Zhang, Feiyi Chen, Yinuo Deng, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y Zomaya. Cloud-native computing: A survey from the perspective of services. Proceedings of the IEEE, 112(1):12–46, 2024.

Arpad E Elo and Sam Sloan. The rating of chessplayers: Past and present. (No Title), 1978.

Viktor Engström, Pontus Johnson, Robert Lagerström, Erik Ringdahl, and Max Wällstedt. Automated security assessments of amazon web services environments. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 26(2):1–31, 2023.

Xiang He, Zhiying Tu, Xiaofei Xu, and Zhongjie Wang. Re-deploying microservices in edge and cloud environment for the optimization of user-perceived service quality. In Service-Oriented Computing: 17th International Conference, ICSOC 2019, Toulouse, France, October 28–31, 2019, Proceedings 17, pages 555–560. Springer, 2019.

Arash Heidari, Nima Jafari Navimipour, and Mehmet Unal. A secure intrusion detection platform using blockchain and radial basis function neural networks for internet of drones. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 10(10):8445–8454, 2023.

Yang Hu, Wenxi Wang, and Mohit Tiwari. Greybox penetration testing on cloud access control with iam modeling and deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14540, 2023.

Keman Huang, Michael Siegel, and Stuart Madnick. Systematically understanding the cyber attack business: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 51(4):1–36, 2018.

Amjad Ibrahim, Stevica Bozhinoski, and Alexander Pretschner. Attack graph generation for microservice architecture. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP symposium on applied computing, pages 1235–1242, 2019.

Hai Jin, Zhi Li, Deqing Zou, and Bin Yuan. Dseom: A framework for dynamic security evaluation and optimization of mtd in container-based cloud. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 18(3):1125–1136, 2019.

Meraj Mostam Kashi, Anis Yazidi, and Hårek Haugerud. Mitigating yo-yo attacks on cloud auto-scaling. In 2022 14th IFIP Wireless and Mobile Networking Conference (WMNC), pages 46–53. IEEE, 2022.

Alper Kerman, Oliver Borchert, Scott Rose, Allen Tan, et al. Implementing a zero trust architecture. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 75, 2020.

Issa M Khalil, Abdallah Khreishah, and Muhammad Azeem. Cloud computing security: A survey. Computers, 3(1):1–35, 2014.

Minhaj Ahmad Khan. A survey of security issues for cloud computing. Journal of network and computer applications, 71:11–29, 2016.

Eunji Kim, Jungsu Han, and JongWon Kim. Visualizing cloud-native ai+ x applications employing service mesh. In 2020 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC), pages 1566–1569. IEEE, 2020.

Yuanbo Li, Hongchao Hu, Wenyan Liu, and Xiaohan Yang. An optimal active defensive security framework for the container-based cloud with deep reinforcement learning. Electronics, 12(7):1598, 2023.

Fang Liu, Guoming Tang, Youhuizi Li, Zhiping Cai, Xingzhou Zhang, and Tongqing Zhou. A survey on edge computing systems and tools. Proceedings of the IEEE, 107(8):1537–1562, 2019.

Tengchao Ma, Changqiao Xu, Shujie Yang, Yiting Huang, Qingzhao An, Xiaohui Kuang, and Luigi Alfredo Grieco. A mutation-enabled proactive defense against service-oriented man-in-the-middle attack in kubernetes. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2023.

Zhao Mandi, Pieter Abbeel, and Stephen James. On the effectiveness of fine-tuning versus meta-reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.03271, 2022.

Antony Martin, Simone Raponi, Théo Combe, and Roberto Di Pietro. Docker ecosystem–vulnerability analysis. Computer Communications, 122:30–43, 2018.

Nuno Mateus-Coelho, Manuela Cruz-Cunha, and Luis Gonzaga Ferreira. Security in microservices architectures. Procedia Computer Science, 181:1225–1236, 2021.

Volodymyr Mnih, Adria Puigdomenech Badia, Mehdi Mirza, Alex Graves, Timothy Lillicrap, Tim Harley, David Silver, and Koray Kavukcuoglu. Asynchronous methods for deep reinforcement learning. In International conference on machine learning, pages 1928–1937. PMLR, 2016.

Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Alex Graves, Ioannis Antonoglou, Daan Wierstra, and Martin Riedmiller. Playing atari with deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.5602, 2013.

Viraaji Mothukuri, Reza M Parizi, Seyedamin Pouriyeh, Yan Huang, Ali Dehghantanha, and Gautam Srivastava. A survey on security and privacy of federated learning. Future Generation Computer Systems, 115:619–640, 2021.

Jargalsaikhan Narantuya, Seunghyun Yoon, Hyuk Lim, Jin-Hee Cho, Dong Seong Kim, Terrence Moore, and Frederica Nelson. Sdn-based ip shuffling moving target defense with multiple sdn controllers. In 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks–Supplemental Volume (DSN-S), pages 15–16. IEEE, 2019.

Gregory Palmer, Chris Parry, Daniel JB Harrold, and Chris Willis. Deep reinforcement learning for autonomous cyber operations: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07745, 2023.

Neeraj Kumar Pandey, Krishna Kumar, Gaurav Saini, and Amit Kumar Mishra. Security issues and challenges in cloud of things-based applications for industrial automation. Annals of Operations Research, 342(1):565–584, 2024.

Keri Pearlson and Keman Huang. Design for cybersecurity from the start. MIT Sloan Management Review, 63(2):73–77, 2022.

John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, and Oleg Klimov. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06347, 2017.

Maxwell Standen, Martin Lucas, David Bowman, Toby J Richer, Junae Kim, and Damian Marriott. Cyborg: A gym for the development of autonomous cyber agents. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09118, 2021.

Hamed Tabrizchi and Marjan Kuchaki Rafsanjani. A survey on security challenges in cloud computing: issues, threats, and solutions. The journal of supercomputing, 76(12):9493–9532, 2020.

Microsoft Defender Research Team. Cyberbattlesim. https://github.com/microsoft/cyberbattlesim, 2021. Created by Christian Seifert, Michael Betser, William Blum, James Bono, Kate Farris, Emily Goren, Justin Grana, Kristian Holsheimer, Brandon Marken, Joshua Neil, Nicole Nichols, Jugal Parikh, Haoran Wei.

Theodoros Theodoropoulos, Antonios Makris, Ioannis Kontopoulos, John Violos, Przemysław Tarkowski, Zbyszek Ledwoń, Patrizio Dazzi, and Konstantinos Tserpes. Graph neural networks for representing multivariate resource usage: A multiplayer mobile gaming case-study. International Journal of Information Management Data Insights, 3(1):100158, 2023.

Theodoros Theodoropoulos, Luis Rosa, Chafika Benzaid, Peter Gray, Eduard Marin, Antonios Makris, Luis Cordeiro, Ferran Diego, Pavel Sorokin, Marco Di Girolamo, et al. Security in cloud-native services: A survey. Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy, 3(4):758–793, 2023.

Kennedy A Torkura, Muhammad IH Sukmana, Anne VDM Kayem, Feng Cheng, and Christoph Meinel. A cyber risk based moving target defense mechanism for microservice architectures. In 2018 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Ubiquitous Computing & Communications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Social Computing & Networking, Sustainable Computing & Communications (ISPA/IUCC/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom), pages 932–939. IEEE, 2018.

Abhishek Verma, Luis Pedrosa, Madhukar Korupolu, David Oppenheimer, Eric Tune, and John Wilkes. Large-scale cluster management at google with borg. In Proceedings of the tenth european conference on computer systems, pages 1–17, 2015.

Sanyam Vyas, John Hannay, Andrew Bolton, and Professor Pete Burnap. Automated cyber defence: A review. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.04926, 2023.

Erich Walter, Kimberly Ferguson-Walter, and Ahmad Ridley. Incorporating deception into cyberbattlesim for autonomous defense. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.13980, 2021.

Huan Wang, Yunlong Tang, Yan Wang, Ning Wei, Junyi Deng, Zhiyan Bin, and Weilong Li. Research on active defense decision-making method for cloud boundary networks based on reinforcement learning of intelligent agent. High-Confidence Computing, page 100145, 2023.

Hanyi Xu, Guozhen Cheng, Xiaohan Yang, Wenyan Liu, Dacheng Zhou, and Wei Guo. Multi-dimensional moving target defense method based on adaptive simulated annealing genetic algorithm. Electronics, 13(3):487, 2024.

George OM Yee. Modeling and reducing the attack surface in software systems. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 11th International Workshop on Modelling in Software Engineering (MiSE), pages 55–62. IEEE, 2019.

Dongjin Yu, Yike Jin, Yuqun Zhang, and Xi Zheng. A survey on security issues in services communication of microservices-enabled fog applications. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 31(22):e4436, 2019.

Marco Zambianco, Claudio Facchinetti, Roberto Doriguzzi-Corin, and Domenico Siracusa. Resource-aware cyber deception in cloud-native environments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03151, 2023.

Marco Zambianco, Claudio Facchinetti, Roberto Doriguzzi-Corin, and Domenico Siracusa. Resource-aware cyber deception for microservice-based applications. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 2024.

Fiorella Zampetti, Salvatore Geremia, Gabriele Bavota, and Massimiliano Di Penta. Ci/cd pipelines evolution and restructuring: A qualitative and quantitative study. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), pages 471–482. IEEE, 2021.

Uwe Zdun, Pierre-Jean Queval, Georg Simhandl, Riccardo Scandariato, Somik Chakravarty, Marjan Jelic, and Aleksandar Jovanovic. Microservice security metrics for secure communication, identity management, and observability. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 32(1):1–34, 2023.

Kengo Zenitani. Attack graph analysis: an explanatory guide. Computers & Security, 126:103081, 2023.

Downloads

Published

2025-07-31

How to Cite

Yan, Y. ., Huang, K. ., & Siegel, M. . (2025). ISSF: An Intelligent Security Service Framework for Cloud-native Operations. Journal of Web Engineering, 24(04), 655–686. https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.2447

Issue

Section

Articles