Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without utsourcing Control.

ABSTRACT Cloud computing is clearly one of today's most enticing technology areas due, at least in part, to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. However, despite the surge in activity and interest, there are significant, persistent concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In this paper, we characterize the problems and their impact on adoption. In addition, and equally importantly, we describe how the combination of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. In particular, we argue that with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today

Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without utsourcing Control.

ABSTRACT Cloud computing is clearly one of today's most enticing technology areas due, at least in part, to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. However, despite the surge in activity and interest, there are significant, persistent concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In this paper, we characterize the problems and their impact on adoption. In addition, and equally importantly, we describe how the combination of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. In particular, we argue that with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today

Talek: Private Group Messaging with Hidden Access Patterns

Talek is a private group messaging system that sends messages through potentially untrustworthy servers, while hiding both data content and the communication patterns among its users. Talek explores a new point in the design space of private messaging; it guarantees access sequence indistinguishability, which is among the strongest guarantees in the space, while assuming an anytrust threat model, which is only slightly weaker than the strongest threat model currently found in related work. Our results suggest that this is a pragmatic point in the design space, since it supports strong privacy and good performance: we demonstrate a 3-server Talek cluster that achieves throughput of 9,433 messages/second for 32,000 active users with 1.7-second end-to-end latency. To achieve its security goals without coordination between clients, Talek relies on information-theoretic private information retrieval. To achieve good performance and minimize server-side storage, Talek intro- duces new techniques and optimizations that may be of independent interest, e.g., a novel use of blocked cuckoo hashing and support for private notifications. The latter provide a private, efficient mechanism for users to learn, without polling, which logs have new messages