Analysis of Cyber Defense mechanisms using honeypots in Cloud Environment

The demand for IT infrastructure is increasing at an exponential rate as markets migrate to the digital environment. Cloud computing services are becoming more and more enticing to individuals as well as organizations because of its openness and ease of use. Additionally, Cloud Computing provides IT resources at low to no capital costs and the pay-as-you-go model gives the required incentives to startups and new market players. Nevertheless, the sheer enormity of cloud-based services, as well as the enormous volume of data stored there, attracts both attackers and victims. Attack vectors on cloud vary from Insider attacks to Account Hijacking and from Cloud injection to Denial-of- Service attacks. Problems like loss of control and databreaches stem from aforementioned attack vectors that lead to lack of trust among clients. Thus, the security aspect of cloud environments has become paramount.Honeypots are simple mechanisms that are designed to detect and fend off malicious requests away from critical institutional resources. Honeypots predominantly implement virtualization techniques to create virtual systems and environments with apparent vulnerabilities to attract potential attackers. Initial attempts in the area of Cloud security, as well as the approaches utilized to safeguard and protect these systems, are incorporated into this article. Additionally, this article also focuses on Honeypot technologies and compares them to anomaly detection and signature-based intrusion detection.