Privacy Protection on Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud is becoming the most popular computing infrastructure because it can attract more and more traditional companies due to flexibility and cost-effectiveness. However, privacy concern is the major issue that prevents users from deploying on public clouds. My research focuses on protecting user\u27s privacy in cloud computing. I will present a hardware-based and a migration-based approach to protect user\u27s privacy. The root cause of the privacy problem is current cloud privilege design gives too much power to cloud providers. Once the control virtual machine (installed by cloud providers) is compromised, external adversaries will breach users’ privacy. Malicious cloud administrators are also possible to disclose user’s privacy by abusing the privilege of cloud providers. Thus, I develop two cloud architectures – MyCloud and MyCloud SEP to protect user’s privacy based on hardware virtualization technology. I eliminate the privilege of cloud providers by moving the control virtual machine (control VM) to the processor’s non-root mode and only keep the privacy protection and performance crucial components in the Trust Computing Base (TCB). In addition, the new cloud platform can provide rich functionalities on resource management and allocation without greatly increasing the TCB size. Besides the attacks to control VM, many external adversaries will compromise one guest VM or directly install a malicious guest VM, then target other legitimate guest VMs based on the connections. Thus, collocating with vulnerable virtual machines, or ”bad neighbors” on the same physical server introduces additional security risks. I develop a migration-based scenario that quantifies the security risk of each VM and generates virtual machine placement to minimize the security risks considering the connections among virtual machines. According to the experiment, our approach can improve the survivability of most VMs