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Secure container orchestration in the cloud: policies and implementation

Published: 08 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In the late few years, cloud computing has been moving towards becoming the predominant infrastructure paradigm because of its scale economy advantages. Consequently, a great deal of sensitive and valuable information has begun to inhabit the cloud environment. At the current stage, a large amount of organizations is yet to step to the public cloud world because, primarily, the loss of infrastructure ownership gives away control of such information, and that is generally perceived as a severe security risk.
Currently available cloud security platforms fail to present a process to accomplish a secure and cloud compatible operation flow. In this work we propose a policy that enforces data security in the cloud. To implement the cloud based components of that policy we created SCO (Secure Container Orchestrator) a container orchestration engine that makes use of the most recent hardware-based trusted execution environment technologies for data protection, in our case, Intel SGX. SCO implements SGX friendly container auto-scaling schemes, load balancing routing and packs SGX compatibility features. These characteristics enable the deployment of trusted applications in alignment with standard cloud practices.
We also compare SCO to the state-of-the-practice in container orchestration (Kubernetes), demonstrate the inherent costs of employing this security enhanced solution, and present a methodology to support business decisions regarding its utilization.

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  • (2024)Trusting the Cloud-Native Edge: Remotely Attested Kubernetes Workers2024 33rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN61486.2024.10637515(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
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  • (2023)SecCoProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems10.1145/3599957.3606222(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '19: Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2019
2682 pages
ISBN:9781450359337
DOI:10.1145/3297280
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 08 April 2019

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Author Tags

  1. cloud computing
  2. container orchestration
  3. identity authentication
  4. secure load balancing
  5. trusted execution environment

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Trusting the Cloud-Native Edge: Remotely Attested Kubernetes Workers2024 33rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN61486.2024.10637515(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Identifying the primary dimensions of DevSecOpsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112063214:COnline publication date: 18-Jul-2024
  • (2023)SecCoProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems10.1145/3599957.3606222(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Containerization for High Performance Computing Systems: Survey and ProspectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322922149:4(2722-2740)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Container orchestration on HPC systems through KubernetesJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-021-00231-z10:1Online publication date: 22-Feb-2021
  • (2021)Containerization and Orchestration on HPC SystemsSustained Simulation Performance 2019 and 202010.1007/978-3-030-68049-7_10(133-147)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2021
  • (2020)A Load Balancing Algorithm for Mobile Devices in Edge Cloud Computing EnvironmentsElectronics10.3390/electronics90406869:4(686)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2020

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