Multilevel Contracts for Trusted Components

This article contributes to the design and the verification of trusted components and services. The contracts are declined at several levels to cover then different facets, such as component consistency, compatibility or correctness. The article introduces multilevel contracts and a design+verification process for handling and analysing these contracts in component models. The approach is implemented with the COSTO platform that supports the Kmelia component model. A case study illustrates the overall approach.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

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

Distributed intrusion detection trust management through integrity and expertise evaluation

Information sharing and collaboration has facilitated decision accuracy and reaction time in many applications. Distributed Intrusion Detection Systems (DIDS) solutions are one of such applications that have dramatically been transformed. This is mainly due to increasing number of attacks as well as sophisticated nature of today's intrusions. Moreover, it has been shown that various critical components of a system can be targeted. This is further exasperated by the fact that most DIDS models do not consider attacks that targets the collaborative network itself. We specifically find this issue to be very critical and hence in this paper we propose a trust aware DIDS simulation model that is capable of categorizing each participating IDS expertise (i.e. speciality and competence), therefore helps collaborating organizations to consult our simulation model for choosing the right candidate for any type of intrusion. We call our proposed DIDS model Consultative Trusted Computing-based Collaborative IDS (CTC IDS). We utilize the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for integrity evaluation and to fine-tune peer evaluation

ARMor: fully verified software fault isolation

ManuscriptWe have designed and implemented ARMor, a system that uses software fault isolation (SFI) to sandbox application code running on small embedded processors. Sandboxing can be used to protect components such as the RTOS and critical control loops from other, less-trusted components. ARMor guarantees memory safety and control flow integrity; it works by rewriting a binary to put a check in front of every potentially dangerous operation. We formally and automatically verify that an ARMored application respects the SFI safety properties using the HOL theorem prover. Thus, ARMor provides strong isolation guarantees and has an exceptionally small trusted computing base-there is no trusted compiler, binary rewriter, verifier, or operating system

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View

For cloud users and providers alike, security is an everyday concern, yet there are very few books covering cloud security as a main subject. This book will help address this information gap from an Information Technology solution and usage-centric view of cloud infrastructure security. The book highlights the fundamental technology components necessary to build and enable trusted clouds. Here also is an explanation of the security and compliance challenges organizations face as they migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud, and how trusted clouds, that have their integrity rooted in hardware, can address these challenges. This book provides: Use cases and solution reference architectures to enable infrastructure integrity and the creation of trusted pools leveraging Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Trusted geo-location management in the cloud, enabling workload and data location compliance and boundary control usages in the cloud. OpenStack-based reference architecture of tenant-controlled virtual machine and workload protection in the cloud. A reference design to enable secure hybrid clouds for a cloud bursting use case, providing infrastructure visibility and control to organizations