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Many enterprise solutions today are built upon complex distributed systems which are accessible to the users globally. Due to this global access, the security of the host platforms becomes critical. The platform administrators use security automation techniques such as those provided by Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) standards to protect the systems from the vulnerabilities that are reported daily; furthermore, they are responsible for keeping their systems compliant to the relevant security recommendations (governmental or industrial). Additionally, third party audit and certification processes are used to increase user trust in enterprise solutions. However, traditional audit and certification mechanisms are not continuous, that is, not frequent enough to deal with the daily reported vulnerabilities, and for that matter even auditors expect platform administrators to keep the systems updated. As a result, the end user is also forced to trust the platform administrators about the latest state of the platform. In this paper we develop an automated security audit and certification system (ASArP) which can be used by platform users or by third party auditors. We use security automation techniques for continuous monitoring of the platform security posture and make the results trustworthy by using trusted computing (TCG) techniques. The prototype development of ASArP validates the implementation feasibility; it also provides performance benchmarks which show that the ASArP based audit and certification can be done much more frequently (e.g. daily or weekly). The feasibility of ASArP based continuous audits is significantly better than traditional platform audits which are dependent on the physical presence of the auditors, thus making frequent audits much more expensive and operationally infeasible.

The evolution of cloud computing allows the provisioning of IT resources over the Internet and promises many benefits for both - the service users and providers. Despite various benefits offered by cloud based services, many users hesitate in moving their IT systems to the cloud mainly due to many new security problems introduced by cloud environments. In fact, the characteristics of cloud computing become basis of new problems, for example, support of third party hosting introduces loss of user control on the hardware; similarly, on-demand availability requires reliance on complex and possibly insecure API interfaces; seamless scalability relies on the use of sub-providers; global access over public Internet exposes to broader attack surface; and use of shared resources for better resource utilization introduces isolation problems in a multi-tenant environment. These new security issues in addition to existing security challenges (that exist in today's classic IT environments) become major reasons for the lack of user trust in cloud based services categorized in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

The focus of this thesis is on IaaS model which allows users to lease IT resources (e.g. computing power, memory, storage, etc.) from a public cloud to create Virtual Machine (VM) instances. The public cloud deployment model considered in this thesis exhibits most elasticity (i.e. degree of freedom to lease/release IT resources according to user demand) but is least secure as compared to private or hybrid models. As a result, public clouds are not trusted for many use cases which involve processing of security critical data such as health records, financial data, government data, etc. However, public IaaS clouds can also be made trustworthy and viable for these use cases by providing better transparency and security assurance services for the user. In this thesis, we consider such assurance services and identify security aspects which are important for making public clouds trustworthy. Based upon our findings, we propose solutions which promise to improve cloud transparency thereby realizing trustworthy clouds.

The solutions presented in this thesis mainly deal with the secure life cycle management of the user VM which include protocols and their implementation for secure VM launch and migration. The VM launch and migration solutions ensure that the user VM is always hosted on correct cloud platforms which are setup according to a profile that fulfills the use case relevant security requirements. This is done by using an automated platform security audit and certification mechanism which uses trusted computing and security automation techniques in an integrated solution. In addition to provide the assurance about the cloud platforms, we also propose a solution which provides assurance about the placement of user data in correct and approved geographical locations which is critical from many legal aspects and usually an important requirement of the user. Finally, the assurance solutions provided in this thesis increase cloud transparency which is important for user trust and to realize trustworthy clouds.

Data geolocation in the cloud is becoming an increasingly pressing problem, aggravated by incompatible legislation in different jurisdictions and compliance requirements of data owners. In this work we present a mechanism allowing cloud users to control the geographical location of their data, stored or processed in plaintext on the premises of Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers. We use trusted computing principles and remote attestation to establish platform state. We enable cloud users to confine plaintext data exclusively to the jurisdictions they specify, by sealing decryption keys used to obtain plaintext data to the combination of cloud host geolocation and platform state. We provide a detailed description of the implementation as well as performance measurements on an open source cloud infrastructure platform using commodity hardware.

In many new distributed systems paradigms such a cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), electronic banking, etc. the security of the host platforms is very critical which is managed by the platform owner. The platform administrators use security automation techniques such as those provided by Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) standards to ensure that the outsourced platforms are set up correctly and follow the security recommendations (governmental or industry). However, the remote platform users still have to trust the platform administrators. The third party security audits, used to shift the required user trust from the platform owner to a trusted entity, are scheduled and are not very frequent to deal with the daily reported vulnerabilities which can be exploited by the attackers. In this paper we propose a remote platform evaluation mechanism which can be used by the remote platform users themselves, or by the auditors to perform frequent platform security audits for the platform users. We analyze the existing SCAP and trusted computing (TCG) standards for our solution, identify their shortcomings, and suggest ways to integrate them. Our proposed platform security evaluation framework uses the synergy of TCG and SCAP to address the limitations of each technology when used separately

Companies that process business critical and secret data are reluctant to use utility and cloud computing for the risk that their data gets stolen by rogue system administrators at the hosting company. We describe a system organization that prevents host administrators from directly accessing or installing eaves-dropping software on the machine that holds the client’s valuable data. Clients are monitored via machine code probes that are inlined into the clients’ programs at runtime. The system enables the cloud provider to install and remove software probes into the machine code without stopping the client’s program, and it prevents the provider from installing probes not granted by the client.

The evolution of cloud technologies which allows the provisioning of IT resources over the Internet promises many benefits for the individuals and enterprises alike. However, this new resource provisioning model comes with the security challenges which did not exist in the traditional resource procurement mechanisms. We focus on the possible security concerns of a cloud user (e.g. an organization, government department, etc.) to lease cloud services such as resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VM) from a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. There are many security critical areas in the cloud systems, such as data confidentiality, resource integrity, service compliance, security audits etc. In this thesis, we focus on the security aspects which result in the trust deficit among the cloud stakeholders and hence hinder a security sensitive user to benefit from the opportunities offered by the cloud computing. Based upon our findings from the security requirements analysis,we propose solutions that enable user trust in the public IaaS clouds. Our solutions mainly deal with the secure life cycle management of the user VM which include mechanisms for VM launch and migration. The VM launch and migration solutions ensure that the user VM is always protected in the cloud by only allowing it to run on the user trusted platforms. This is done by using trusted computing techniques that allow the users to remotely attest and hence rate the cloud platforms trusted or untrusted. We also provide a prototype implementation to prove the implementation feasibility of the proposed trust enabling principles used in the VM launch and migration solutions.

In this paper we consider the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud model which allows cloud users to run their own virtual machines (VMs) on available cloud computing resources. IaaS gives enterprises the possibility to outsource their process workloads with minimal effort and expense. However, one major problem with existing approaches of cloud leasing, is that the users can only get contractual guarantees regarding the integrity of the offered platforms. The fact that the IaaS user himself or herself cannot verify the provider promised cloud platform integrity, is a security risk which threatens to prevent the IaaS business in general. In this paper we address this issue and propose a novel secure VM launch protocol using Trusted Computing techniques. This protocol allows the cloud IaaS users to securely bind the VM to a trusted computer configuration such that the clear text VM only will run on a platform that has been booted into a trustworthy state. This capability builds user confidence and can serve as an important enabler for creating trust in public clouds. We evaluate the feasibility of our proposed protocol via a full scale system implementation and perform a system security analysis.

In this paper we consider the security and trustimplications of virtual machine (VM) migration from one cloudplatform to the other in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service model. We show how to extend and complement previous Trusted Computing techniques for secure VM launchto also cover the VM migration case. In particular, we propose a Trust_Token based VM migration protocol which guarantees that the user VM can only be migrated to a trustworthy cloud platform. Different from previous schemes, our solution is not dependent on an active (on-line) trusted third party. We show how our proposed mechanisms fulfill major security and trust requirements for secure VM migration in cloud 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 sealingto 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.