🔐 Secure-by-Design Distributed Cloud Architectures

A structured cybersecurity research project focused on designing, validating, and benchmarking detection capabilities in distributed cloud-native environments.

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🧠 Research Journey

🏗️ Weeks 1–2: Architecture Design

• Designed distributed cloud architecture
• Defined trust boundaries

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⚠️ Weeks 3–4: Threat Modelling

• STRIDE analysis
• Attack surface identification

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🛡️ Weeks 5–6: Control Validation

• Simulated SSH brute-force attacks
• Validated Wazuh SIEM detection
• Confirmed log ingestion and alerting

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🔍 Weeks 7–8: Detection Validation & Empirical Benchmarking

• Verified end-to-end detection pipeline
• Conducted attack simulations using Hydra
• Validated SIEM detection behavior

📄 View Work:
docs/week7-8-detection-validation/

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📚 Weeks 9–10: Targeted Literature Review & Research Gap Identification

• Reviewed research aligned with leading academics
• Identified gaps in detection performance evaluation
• Defined research problem direction

📄 View Work:
docs/week9-10-literature-review/

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🎯 Research Direction

This project is evolving toward:

A reproducible framework for empirical detection benchmarking in distributed cloud systems

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🛠️ Technologies

• Wazuh SIEM
• Kali Linux
• Ubuntu Desktop
• Hydra (attack simulation)
• VirtualBox

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📂 Repository Structure

📁 Lab01-SecureDistributedCloud
│
├── 📄 README.md
│
├── 📁 docs
│ │
│ ├── 📁 00-research-assets
│ │ ├── 📁 diagrams
│ │ │ ├── secure-cloud-architecture.drawio
│ │ │ ├── week1-architecture-v1.1.png
│ │ │ └── threat-model-attack-surface-week3.png
│ │ │
│ │ └── 📁 screenshots
│ │     ├── 📁 week5-control-validation
│ │     ├── 📁 week6-extended-analysis
│ │     └── 📁 week7-8-detection-validation   ✅
│ │
│ ├── 📁 week1-2-architecture
│ ├── 📁 week3-4-threat-modelling
│ ├── 📁 week5-6-control-validation
│ │
│ ├── 📁 week7-8-detection-validation   ✅
│ │ └── week7-8-detection-validation.md
│ │
│ └── 📁 week9-10-literature-review   ✅
│     └── week9-10-targeted-literature-review.md


# 📄 Licence

Academic and research use.

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# 👤  Author

Charles Owajoba  
Cybersecurity | Cloud Security | Detection Engineering  

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# 🌍 Vision

Bridging the gap between:

> Secure system design  
and  
> measurable detection effectiveness