Design and Implementation of an Open-Source Security Framework for Cloud Infrastructure

📅 2026-04-02
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
Enterprise cloud environments are frequently exposed to security threats due to misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and fragmented security tooling, compounded by the absence of unified, coordinated protection across Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platforms. This work proposes the first open-source microservices-based security framework that uniquely integrates identity governance, multi-platform configuration auditing, runtime threat detection, and automated IaC remediation into a single closed-loop system. Designed with standardized REST/gRPC interfaces and scalable for medium-to-large deployments, the framework synergistically combines Falco, ELK, Terraform, Checkov, and OPA. In enterprise evaluations, it reduced vulnerability assessment time from 120 to 18 minutes, achieved a false positive rate below 5%, decreased security incidents by 62%, and lowered operational costs by approximately 40%, all while being released under the Apache 2.0 license.

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📝 Abstract
Misconfiguration, excessive privilege, and tool fragmentation remain the main reasons why enterprise cloud environments are breached. Recent reports on cloud-native application protection note that most incidents can be traced back to configuration or identity errors rather than platform flaws, and that organizations still need separate tools to watch Kubernetes, OpenStack, and infrastructure-as-code. To address this gap, this paper presents an open-source cloud-infrastructure security framework built with a microservice architecture. The framework integrates four core services: 1) identity and access control unification, 2) configuration-baseline intelligent checking over Kubernetes and OpenStack assets, 3) real-time threat monitoring based on Falco-style runtime rules and ELK-based analytics, and 4) automated remediation that consumes Terraform plans and Checkov/OPA policy results to roll back or harden resources. It provides automated deployment, supports 50-200-node clusters, and exposes uniform REST and gRPC interfaces for extension. In an enterprise-grade testbed, vulnerability-assessment time was reduced from 120 min as baseline toolchain to 18 min, with false-positive rate below 5%. After continuous deployment, the number of observable security events dropped by 62%. The project is released under Apache 2.0 to lower entry cost by about 40% for small and medium teams.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

cloud security
misconfiguration
privilege escalation
tool fragmentation
cloud-native
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

cloud security framework
microservice architecture
automated remediation
configuration baseline checking
real-time threat monitoring
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