Providing User Security Guarantee in Public Infrastructure clouds

Abstract

The infrastructure cloud (IaaS) service model offers improved resource flexibility and availability, where
tenants – insulated from the minutiae of hardware maintenance – rent computing resources to deploy and operate
complex systems. Large-scale services running on IaaS platforms demonstrate the viability of this model; nevertheless,
many organizations operating on sensitive data avoid migrating operations to IaaS platforms due to security concerns.
In this paper, we describe a framework for data and operation security in IaaS, consisting of protocols for a trusted
launch of virtual machines and domain-based storage protection. We continue with an extensive theoretical analysis with
proofs about protocol resistance against attacks in the defined threat model. The protocols allow trust to be established
by remotely attesting host platform configuration prior to launching guest virtual machines and ensure confidentiality of
data in remote storage, with encryption keys maintained outside of the IaaS domain. Presented experimental results
demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed protocols. The framework prototype was implemented on a test
bed operating a public electronic health record system, showing that the proposed protocols can be integrated into
existing cloud environments.