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Reflections on the Self-service Cloud Computing Project

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Information Systems Security (ICISS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9478))

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Abstract

Modern cloud computing infrastructures use virtual machine monitors (VMMs) that often include a large and complex administrative domain with privileges to inspect client VM state. Attacks against or misuse of the administrative domain can compromise client security and privacy. Moreover, these VMMs provide clients inflexible control over their own VMs, as a result of which clients have to rely on the cloud provider to deploy useful services, such as VM introspection-based security tools.

This paper discusses the self-service cloud computing (SSC) project that addresses these two shortcomings. SSC splits administrative privileges between a system-wide domain and per-client administrative domains. Each client can manage and perform privileged system tasks on its own VMs, thereby providing flexibility. The system-wide administrative domain cannot inspect the code, data or computation of client VMs, thereby ensuring security and privacy. SSC also allows providers and clients to establish mutually trusted services that can check regulatory compliance while respecting client privacy. We have used a prototype implementation of SSC atop the Xen hypervisor to build user domains to perform privileged tasks such as memory introspection, storage intrusion detection, and anomaly detection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that a client cannot modify this stream without tampering with the code of the MTSD. The provider ensures that the MTSD was booted correctly (Fig. 3(c)), and SSC’s privilege model prevents the client from modifying a running MTSD.

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Acknowledgments

This paper reports work that was done together with my Ph.D. student Shakeel Butt and collaborators Andres Lagar-Cavilla and Abhinav Srivastava. Portions of this work have appeared in ACM CCS 2012, ACM SOCC 2014, and in Shakeel Butt’s Ph.D. thesis. We are thankful to the NSF for their support of parts of this work via grants CNS-0831268, CNS-0915394, CNS-0952128 and CNS-1420815. We also thank Microsoft Research India for their research gift and Sriram Rajamani, Kapil Vaswani, Aditya Nori and Manuel Costa for discussions on SSC and the Intel SGX.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Vinod Ganapathy

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  1. Vinod Ganapathy
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Correspondence to Vinod Ganapathy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Secure Information Systems, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Sushil Jajoda

  2. Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Chandan Mazumdar

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Ganapathy, V. (2015). Reflections on the Self-service Cloud Computing Project. In: Jajoda, S., Mazumdar, C. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26961-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26961-0_4

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