CyberDS: Auditable Monitoring in the Cloud

abstract

When deploying safety-critical systems in the cloud, where de- viations may have severe consequences, the assurance of critical decisions becomes essential. Typical cloud systems are operated by third parties and are built on complex software stacks consisting of e.g., Kubernetes, Istio, or Kafka, which due to their size are difficult to be verified. Nevertheless, one needs to make sure that safety-critical choices are made correctly. In this paper, we propose CyberDS, a flexible runtime monitoring approach designed to transparently monitor safety and data-related properties in the Cloud. CyberDS is based on combining distributed Datalog-based pro- grams with tamper-proof storage based on Trillian to verify the premises of critical actions. We demonstrate our monitoring approach on an in- dustrial use case that uses a cloud infrastructure for the orchestration of unmanned air vehicles.