Supporting Security Sensitive Tenants in a Bare-Metal Cloud

SecCloud is a new architecture for bare-metal clouds that enables tenants to control tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. It enables security-sensitive tenants to minimize their trust in the public cloud provider and achieve similar levels of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers, while not imposing overhead on tenants that are security insensitive and not compromising the flexibility or operational efficiency of the provider. Our prototype exploits a novel provisioning system and specialized firmware to enable elasticity similar to virtualized clouds. Experimentally we quantify the cost of different levels of security for a variety of workloads and demonstrate the value of giving control to the tenant.