Revolutionizing Cloud SLA Management: The Fusion of Semantic Web and Logical Reasoning

Abstract

In recent years, cloud computing has gained widespread adoption and is utilized by numerous organizations across various sectors. As the use of cloud computing and its associated services continues to expand, ensuring their security, identifying vulnerabilities, and performing regular security assessments have become increasingly critical. However, the implementation and evaluation of Security-Based Service Level Agreements (SB-SLAs) in cloud services pose significant challenges. These challenges arise from the complex interactions between different domains, the presence of multiple attack surfaces, and the proliferation of potential security vulnerabilities. This study aims to address the challenges associated with applying SB-SLAs to cloud services. For this purpose, a natural language model has been fine-tuned to facilitate the management of security vulnerabilities within cloud environments. Additionally, SLA ontology and vulnerability ontology are created to model SB-SLAs and security vulnerabilities specific to cloud services. These ontologies are developed to manage security vulnerabilities by concurrently evaluating SB-SLAs and vulnerabilities. Accordingly, the developed ontologies are mapped as the SLAVUL ontology and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules are defined on the SLAVUL ontology. Consequently, the proposed approach is validated using real-world SLA documents. The results of the study indicate that the SLAVUL ontology provides a structured approach to manage security vulnerabilities in cloud systems and the management of cloud system vulnerabilities is effectively enabled through the developed SLAVUL ontology.