4,783 research outputs found
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
Big Ideas paper: Policy-driven middleware for a legally-compliant Internet of Things.
Internet of Things (IoT) applications, systems and services
are subject to law. We argue that for the IoT to develop
lawfully, there must be technical mechanisms that allow the
enforcement of speci ed policy, such that systems align with
legal realities. The audit of policy enforcement must assist
the apportionment of liability, demonstrate compliance with
regulation, and indicate whether policy correctly captures le-
gal responsibilities. As both systems and obligations evolve
dynamically, this cycle must be continuously maintained.
This poses a huge challenge given the global scale of the
IoT vision. The IoT entails dynamically creating new ser-
vices through
managed and exible data exchange
.
Data management is complex in this dynamic environment,
given the need to both control and share information, often
across federated domains of administration.
We see middleware playing a key role in managing the
IoT. Our vision is for a middleware-enforced, uni ed policy
model that applies end-to-end, throughout the IoT. This is
because policy cannot be bound to things, applications, or
administrative domains, since functionality is the result of
composition, with dynamically formed chains of data ows.
We have investigated the use of Information Flow Control
(IFC) to manage and audit data ows in cloud computing;
a domain where trust can be well-founded, regulations are
more mature and associated responsibilities clearer. We feel
that IFC has great potential in the broader IoT context.
However, the sheer scale and the dynamic, federated nature
of the IoT pose a number of signi cant research challenges
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