DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/8VCV-RB96
Defense Date
2015
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Computer Science
First Advisor
Meng Yu
Second Advisor
Xubin He
Third Advisor
Wanyu Zang
Fourth Advisor
Wei Cheng
Fifth Advisor
Wei Zhang
Sixth Advisor
Thang N Dinh
Abstract
Cloud is becoming the most popular computing infrastructure because it can attract more and more traditional companies due to flexibility and cost-effectiveness. However, privacy concern is the major issue that prevents users from deploying on public clouds. My research focuses on protecting user's privacy in cloud computing. I will present a hardware-based and a migration-based approach to protect user's privacy. The root cause of the privacy problem is current cloud privilege design gives too much power to cloud providers. Once the control virtual machine (installed by cloud providers) is compromised, external adversaries will breach users’ privacy. Malicious cloud administrators are also possible to disclose user’s privacy by abusing the privilege of cloud providers. Thus, I develop two cloud architectures – MyCloud and MyCloud SEP to protect user’s privacy based on hardware virtualization technology. I eliminate the privilege of cloud providers by moving the control virtual machine (control VM) to the processor’s non-root mode and only keep the privacy protection and performance crucial components in the Trust Computing Base (TCB). In addition, the new cloud platform can provide rich functionalities on resource management and allocation without greatly increasing the TCB size. Besides the attacks to control VM, many external adversaries will compromise one guest VM or directly install a malicious guest VM, then target other legitimate guest VMs based on the connections. Thus, collocating with vulnerable virtual machines, or ”bad neighbors” on the same physical server introduces additional security risks. I develop a migration-based scenario that quantifies the security risk of each VM and generates virtual machine placement to minimize the security risks considering the connections among virtual machines. According to the experiment, our approach can improve the survivability of most VMs.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-6-2015