CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation

TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art

There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms

The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented Architecture, can also be explored in the future