The followings are my own experience in finding research ideas in security domain.
Ideas from Security Threat
- What the defenders can do to improve security?
- How to detect attackers?
- How to defend against attackers?
For the cloud computing problem, the defenders can be further divided into two categories: (1) Cloud provider (2) Cloud benign users
- What the attackers can do to increase damage?
Ideas from Existing Work
- Improve
- Scalability of their mechanism
- Combine
- Can we combine other mechanisms with their mechanism
- New Problem
- Can we use the proposed mechanism to solve a different problem
- New Mechanism
- Can we solve the problem with a better mechanism