Security services using crowdsourcing

Abstract

Security-as-a-service is an emerging area in cloud computing. Traditionally, security approaches are service provider-centric and provider-driven. In this paper, we propose a model for security-as-a-service using "crowdsourcing". Though crowdsourcing has been used to provide specific security services like browser security, detecting phishing attacks, detecting cybersecurity threats, there has been no work which provides a unified framework to provide different types of security verification. Dispersed computing power of devices is used to perform security verifications. This is done by subscribers in a collaborative way, using their idle resources, in exchange of certain incentives. Our architecture guarantees anonymity of users who request service and the crowd who contribute in verification by using virtualization concepts and virtual machines. Moreover, we propose an approach for managing these security verification jobs, subscribers in a fault tolerant manner. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a unified security-as-a-service framework using crowdsourcing, thus introducing a new research problem. We discuss a number of applications, challenges and problems of crowdsourcing in security verification. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.