1,419 research outputs found
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions
The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last
decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space,
but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider
data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing
cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple
providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers.
These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing
architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These
architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and
devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems.
Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for
realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201
Cloud Computing and Open Source Software: Issues and Developments
Cloud computing is a global paradigm that is
offering useful services in virtually all spheres of human
endeavor based on infrastructure made available to users on
demand. The cloud provides on demand, elastic and scalable
resources to meet the needs of users. The cloud has application
deployed by cloud service providers that can be accessed by
several users at the same time. Cloud computing also offers a
programming environment that allows users deploy and run
their own in-house applications. Massive storage and
computing resources are also available on the cloud. There are
currently open source applications that can be used to
implement cloud applications. The source code which can be
improved on and adapted for use is available to the user online.
Such open source software tools allow the deployment of cloud
for any type of domain. The study was executed by means of
review of some literature available on cloud computing and
open source software. This paper examines present trends in
cloud computing and open source software and provides a
guide for future research. In the present work, the objective is
to answer the following question: what is the current trend and
development in cloud computing and open source software?
The review’s finding is that OpenStack provides the most
comprehensive infrastructure in cloud computing and open
source software
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