Towards Secure Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers many advantages to customers and end-users. It can provide elastic computing infrastructure on demand, resulting in cost, space and power savings for companies. However, Cloud customers and end-users have legitimate concerns: how is the confidentiality and integrity of their sensitive or proprietary data and programs ensured? We discuss new threats posed by Cloud computing, and new architectures, involving hardware support that can overcome some of these threats. At least one of these architectures, our proposed NoHype architecture, does not even need new hardware, but uses recently introduced hardware to achieve more secure virtualization. We discuss solution alternatives. Research collaborations with hypervisor-savvy, hardware or security folks are welcome!

Ruby B. Lee is the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, with an affiliated appointment in the Computer Science department. She is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security (PALMS). Her current research is in designing security and new media support into core computer architecture, embedded systems and global networked systems, and in architectures resistant to Distributed Denial of Service attacks and Internet-scale epidemics. She teaches courses in Cyber Security and Processor Architectures for New Paradigms. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). She is Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Micro and Editorial Board member of IEEE Security and Privacy. She has been granted over 120 United States and international patents.