In spite of the rapid expansion of Amazon EC2 1, Microsoft Azure 2, and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technologies, IaaS services continue to be at risk with vulnerabilities at several levels of the software stack. This includes VM side-channel attacks, information leakage, collocated malicious virtual machine instances, and more. In fact, security concerns like unfamiliarity with the state of the data and algorithms in the cloud, cloud provider bankruptcy concerns, procedures for data protection and retrieval, etc. are some of the major factors that prevent businesses from deploying their data and computations into the cloud. According to the views that are reported by other researchers within the cloud computing security, the reasons for keeping away from cloud computing include fear of data loss, data breach, data tampering, and more.
The economic benefits of using cloud storage and cloud computing promote adoption of these technologies. However, there is a risk in some cases where the economic benefits will be compensated by losses resulting from unavailability, theft, or corruption of data.
The flaws noticed in the software stack underlying IaaS platforms have raised the need to implement trust anchors into hardware. This can potentially reduce the risks by software threats; however, a secured platform needs correct implementation of the trusted hardware.
Ever since the inception of the Trusted Computing and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), the adaptation is slowly gaining momentum, as the hardware manufacturing industry is expediting the adoption of this technology across hardware architectures and platforms, thus making its way into new devices.
Virtualized systems and cloud computing are another important application domain of trusted computing. Some of the security concerns like trustworthy integrity verification of the software components and information protection using trusted computing techniques can be addressed. Moreover, it makes it more complex for an attacker by placing the root of trust at the hardware level. If implemented correctly, an attacker would require physical access to the hardware in order to destroy the TPM. However, there is still lot to be done as the technology is still new and in active development.
In case of virtualized environments and trusted cloud computing, where the functionality of a single TPM chip needs to be shared between several virtual machines, solutions like virtualization of TPMs helps in secure launch and secure migration of VMs. However, the same time new attack techniques introduce new vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is required to find a new solution based on the existing components of the TPM and with minimal changes to the Trusted Computing Base (TCB).
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