Abstract
Security is an important element in Cloud computing. Intruders may exploit clouds for their advantage. This paper presents a cost-aware model for risk mitigation in cloud computing systems. The proposed model is integrated with our Autonomous Cloud Intrusion detection Framework, ACIDF, which continuously monitors and analyzes system events and computes security and risk parameters to provide risk assessment capabilities with a scalable and elastic architecture. The proposed model helps ACIDF to select the appropriate response to mitigate the detected attacks by considering the costs of deploying a response and the costs of damage caused by a non-responded attack. The proposed model reduces the risk by 18.9%. This paper describes the proposed model functions and advantages.