ITADP: An inter-tenant attack detection and prevention framework for multi-tenant SaaS

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a service-oriented Web application running on a Cloud environment. With the multi-tenancy, the SaaS provider can largely reduce the cost of resources and maintenance by sharing the application and database instances between its tenants (clients). This multi-tenancy affects the security of tenants, specifically, when several tenants use the same tables of a single database. Indeed, an important consequence of this full multi-tenancy is that a malicious tenant user can view or modify the rows of other tenants. Consequently, the detection and prevention of attacks among tenants is a key security requirement that should be addressed by the provider. In this sense, this paper proposes an intertenant attack detection and prevention framework, based on SQL syntactic analysis, for multi-tenant SaaS. This framework is integrated in Amazon Web Services (AWS) public Cloud and meets accuracy, portability, compatibility, and ease of integration requirements. The experiment results show that the framework works with small overhead on the virtual machines and minimal impact on the HTTP response time. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.