544 research outputs found
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
Deploying Virtual Machines on Shared Platforms
In this report, we describe mechanisms for secure deployment of virtual machines on shared platforms looking into a telecommunication cloud use case, which is also presented in this report. The architecture we present focuses on the security requirements of the major stakeholders’ part of the scenario we present. This report comprehensively covers all major security aspects including different security mechanisms and protocols, leveraging existing standards and state-of-the art wherever applicable. In particular, our architecture uses TCG technologies for trust establishment in the deployment of operator virtual machines on shared resource platforms. We also propose a novel procedure for securely launching and cryptographically binding a virtual machine to a target platform thereby protecting the operator virtual machine and its related credentials
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
SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX
Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the
underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to
software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome
this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code
against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected
enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect
user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices.
This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX,
allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at
the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this,
SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional
hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure
debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses
traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for
protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and
likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a
modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly
promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1
Trust Evaluation for Embedded Systems Security research challenges identified from an incident network scenario
This paper is about trust establishment and trust
evaluations techniques. A short background about trust, trusted
computing and security in embedded systems is given. An analysis
has been done of an incident network scenario with roaming
users and a set of basic security needs has been identified.
These needs have been used to derive security requirements for devices and systems, supporting the considered scenario. Using the requirements, a list of major security challenges for future research regarding trust establishment in dynamic networks have been collected and elaboration on some different approaches for future research has been done.This work was supported by the Knowledge foundation and RISE within the ARIES project
Privacy-preserving Attestation for Virtualized Network Infrastructures
In multi-tenant cloud environments, physical resources are shared between various parties (called tenants) through the use of virtual machines (VMs). Tenants can verify the state of their VMs by means of deep-attestation: a process by which a (physical or virtual) Trusted Platform Module --TPM -- generates attestation quotes about the integrity state of the VMs. Unfortunately, most existing deep-attestation solutions are either: limited to single-tenant environments, in which tenant {privacy is irrelevant; are inefficient in terms of {linking VM attestations to hypervisor attestations; or provide privacy and/or linking, but at the cost of modifying the TPM hardware.
In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving TPM-based deep-attestation solution in multi-tenant environments, which provably guarantees: (i) Inter-tenant privacy: a tenant is unaware of whether or not the physical machine hosting its VMs also contains other VMs (belonging to other tenants); (ii) Configuration privacy: the hypervisor\u27s configuration, used in the attestation process, remains private with respect to the tenants requiring a hypervisor attestation; and (iii) Layer linking: our protocol enables tenants to link hypervisors with the VMs, thus obtaining a guarantee that their VMs are running on specific physical machines.
Our solution relies on vector commitments and ZK-SNARKs. We build on the security model of Arfaoui et al. and provide both formalizations of the properties we require and proofs that our scheme does, in fact attain them. Our protocol is scalable, and our implementation results prove that it is viable, even for a large number of VMs hosted on a single platform
State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security
Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu-
rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security
aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we
examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of
selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud
storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec-
tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key
management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while
novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro-
tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox
available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent
government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough
attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical
location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review
represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage
security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems
that are being addressed
Trusted Launch of Virtual Machine Instances in Public IaaS Environments
Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are emerging
and promising technologies, however their adoption is hampered by data security
concerns. At the same time, Trusted Computing (TC) is experiencing an increasing
interest as a security mechanism for IaaS. In this paper we present a protocol
to ensure the launch of a virtual machine (VM) instance on a trusted remote
compute host. Relying on Trusted Platform Module operations such as binding
and sealing to provide integrity guarantees for clients that require a trusted VM
launch, we have designed a trusted launch protocol for VM instances in public IaaS
environments. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of the protocol
based on OpenStack, an open-source IaaS platform. The results provide a basis
for the use of TC mechanisms within IaaS platforms and pave the way for a wider
applicability of TC to IaaS security
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