A Novel Real Time Offline Patching Scheme with Secured Logging Over Cloud

Modern day software systems are updated online through an update server. A metadata file is installed at the update server that exposes the information about current version, build, software changes, system requirement, information about fixes, priority and also a URL to the software bundle offered as update. The software installed in client machine checks for this metadata as and when it is scheduled to check for update and has an internet connection. Once the software finds out that there are updates available, it asks the user for permission to update. In update process it silently downloads the patch or the bundle file and updates the software. Once updated the new version is launched. This technique has certain disadvantages that it is not centralized and is not suitable for patching software in a cloud architecture where several virtual machines collaborates to provide service. The update and patching information is stored locally as a log file which does not provide any security. In this paper we propose a unique patching scheme to overcome the aforementioned drawback of current OPS in which metadata of the image and the patching and update information is stored as a secured file which is encrypted using symmetric key encryption using AES and Rijndael. It is also demonstrated the feasibility of the system on real windows updates by enabling centralized offline updating the windows updates. In the offline scheme, updates and patches are downloaded using a background agent without the need for the software to be running. Once patches are available, they can be scheduled to be applied at a later instance. This provides better bandwidth utilization. Results show that the complexity of the process is O (k+1/n) and that the system does not add any significant overhead for security extension. Index Terms Offline patching, Cloud Computing, AES, Secured Log Access