POC of Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku System

Date
2017
Authors
Chen, Yuzhu
Supervisor
Litchfield, Alan
Item type
Thesis
Degree name
Master of Computer and Information Sciences
Journal Title
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Publisher
Auckland University of Technology
Abstract

With the rapid development of technology, most of people and companies have chosen to develop services in the cloud environment. As the cloud computing technology become more and more popular, security and performance issues are considered to be important parts to be concerned. Applications that are implemented into the cloud environment still face many challenges, such as easy to be exposed and tracked, need extra cloud solutions for fault recovery, etc.

In this project, we want to proof the concept of a newly proposed distributed security system, and use the proofed concept to develop a decentralized distributed security system in the cloud environment, which brings absolute redundancy, availability, and fault-tolerant ability to user’s applications. In this research, Design Science Research (DSR) methodology and Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology are both used during the whole research process. Within the DSR research circle, RAD takes the role to lead the prototype development, and reflect the potential requirements and problems back to DSR for further theory support. This research covers cloud security problems, distributed systems, and also decentralized systems. Based on the research in these fields, a great theory background of this prototype system is established. This prototype system will act like a management framework when working with user’s applications. The only thing that the developers should consider is how to fit their application into it. Moreover, since this framework aims to provide a generic solution for different purpose (security, serving costume applications, etc.), so there will be less boundaries when developers try to choose what technologies should work with this framework. As considered to be a security system provided to users, it focuses on providing an extensible way to achieve application security and infrastructure security, which makes developers be eligible to implement any security mechanisms and solutions into it. As considered to be a decentralized distributed system, it is able to be resilient and no single point of failure, so that developers can focus on developing their products by following the rules of the system: Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku. The redundancy and availability of applications are handled by Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku automatically.

The limitations of this research are the big research scope and limited research time. Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku is a really big project, which requires enough time and various technologies to accomplish. It is hard to achieve the expected output within a limited time. Moreover, the selected research methodology (Design Science) doesn’t fit this research perfectly. As a result, another research methodology (Rapid Application Development) is taken into this research and work with Design Science research methodology.

In general, Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku will distribute application’s components into different network locations, and implement security mechanisms to the system. In this research, the system architecture of Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku has been designed, some basic and critical part of the system are also developed in Erlang programming language, such as component distribution, and component communication. Moreover, the ideal environment and limitations of Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku are also discussed in this research.

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Keywords
Cloud computing , Distributed system , Decentralized system , Cloud security
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