A Secure Cloud with Minimal Provider Trust

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Authors: 

Amin Mosayyebzadeh and Gerardo Ravago, Boston University; Apoorve Mohan, Northeastern University; Ali Raza and Sahil Tikale, Boston University; Nabil Schear, MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Trammell Hudson, Two Sigma; Jason Hennessey, Boston University and NetApp; Naved Ansari, Boston University; Kyle Hogan, MIT; Charles Munson, MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Larry Rudolph, Two Sigma; Gene Cooperman and Peter Desnoyers, Northeastern University; Orran Krieger, Boston University

Abstract: 

Bolted is a new architecture for a bare metal cloud with the goal of providing security-sensitive customers of a cloud the same level of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. It allows tenants to elastically allocate secure resources within a cloud while being protected from other previous, current, and future tenants of the cloud. The provisioning of a new server to a tenant isolates a bare metal server, only allowing it to communicate with other tenant's servers once its critical firmware and software have been attested to the tenant. Tenants, rather than the provider, control the tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. A prototype demonstrates scalable end-to-end security with small overhead compared to a less secure alternative.

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