NetSecCC: A scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for cloud computing security

How to ensure network security for modern virtual machine based cloud computing platforms is still an open question. This question becomes more important and urgent to solve, as the fast development of cloud computing in recent years. Though there are many existing solutions, they either provide incomplete protection or neglect important intrinsic characteristics in cloud computing. In this paper, we introduce a novel network security architecture for cloud computing (NetSecCC) considering characteristics of cloud computing. Specifically, it 1) provides protection to both external and interne traffics in cloud computing, 2) attains flexible scalability with respect to virtual middlebox load, and 3) achieves fault-tolerant among virtual middlebox failure. Experiments and simulations on our proof-of-concept prototype of NetSecCC validate that NetSecCC is an effective architecture with minimal performance overhead, and that it can be applied to extensive practical promotion in cloud computing.