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Hardware-Enhanced Security for Cloud Computing

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Secure Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has ushered in an era where cloud customers are able to rapidly access on-demand computing resources made available by third party cloud providers. The cloud providers who maintain these computing resources and lease them out to customers leverage economies of scale and sharing of resources to be able to provide these resources to customers at favorable prices. Cloud computing and this sharing of resources, however, introduces a number of security concerns. These concerns include other, potentially malicious, customers who are co-located on the same system as the customer; or even untrusted system software running on the remote systems where a customer’s code and data execute or reside. To tackle these security concerns, we explore how secure hardware architectures can provide more protections to a customer’s code and data in a cloud computing setting. In particular, we want to show that with hardware enhancements we can make computing in the cloud as secure as in your own dedicated facilities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that the hardware checks that the page is not in use, so it is automatically not accessible to other VMs.

  2. 2.

    If the VM suspend reason is a hypercall then the registers are not encrypted as they are used to pass arguments to the hypercall.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1218817, CCF-0917134 and EEC-0540832.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Olden St., Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Jakub Szefer & Ruby B. Lee

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  1. Jakub Szefer
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  2. Ruby B. Lee
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Correspondence to Jakub Szefer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Krishna Kant

  3. University of Milan, Crema, Italy

    Pierangela Samarati

  4. Computer Security Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA

    Anoop Singhal

  5. The MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, USA

    Vipin Swarup

  6. Computing and Information Science Division, Information Sciences Directorate, Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA

    Cliff Wang

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Szefer, J., Lee, R.B. (2014). Hardware-Enhanced Security for Cloud Computing. In: Jajodia, S., Kant, K., Samarati, P., Singhal, A., Swarup, V., Wang, C. (eds) Secure Cloud Computing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9278-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9278-8_3

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