Automatic handling of security drift in cloud environments

Abstract

Security drift can be automatically handled in cloud environments. A security audit engine can be configured to extract security configuration datasets from cloud resources and create text sentences from the datasets as well as from a golden configuration. These text sentences can be encoded as vectors in an n-dimensional space. Probability distributions can then be generated using the vectors such as by using an unsupervised clustering algorithm. Distance matrixes can then be generated from the probability distributions. A probability distribution pertaining to a dataset and a probability distribution pertaining to the golden configuration can then be compared and normalized using a transport to thereby yield a security drift score representing a divergence of the corresponding security settings from the golden configuration. When a security drift score exceeds a threshold, the security audit engine can take appropriate action.