A Moving Target Defense Framework to Improve Resilience of Cloud-Edge Systems

In recent years, the Cloud-Edge paradigm has been central in technological development to ease the digitization process of complex distributed systems. The idea is to merge advantages of Cloud Computing (such as the computational capacity) and Edge Computing (such as the low overhead on the network) combined with the presence of Internet of Things (IoTs) devices. Due to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of involved devices, their typically limited resources and their exposure to the network, Cloud-Edge systems pose unique security challenges that traditional approaches often struggle to address. In this context, the Moving Target Defense (MTD) approach, which introduces constant change and unpredictability into a system’s environment, is very promising as it makes it difficult for attackers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. This paradigm includes numerous techniques aimed at changing the attack surface by operating at different architectural layers, increasing overall system security and resilience. In this work, we present a novel MTD framework supporting the enforcement of a set of MTD techniques within a Cloud-Edge system according to pre-defined strategies. In order to demonstrate the approach, we illustrate a preliminary implementation of the framework, including a catalogue of four different techniques targeted at containerized applications.