Trusted Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model for IT services. The cloud has become an attractive platform for enterprises to deploy and execute their business services for business to business (B2B) and government to government (G2G) collaborations, etc. There are many concerns about cloud computing especially in terms of security, privacy and trust. These main issues have prevented businesses from fully accepting cloud platforms. Cloud computing demands three primary security requirements: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In this paper we discuss some these issues by reviewing a recently proposed model [1] that interestingly handles secure messaging among services deployed within the same cloud or on different clouds. Then, we report on our ongoing work which is based on enhancing and developing this model. This is mainly achieved by adding a new service layer which is responsible for offering a high level of trust between collaborative parties. The added layer facilitates the integration of this model with the Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). The main objective of the developed model is to increase the trust of the whole system by preventing any unauthorized party from joining the connectivity service. Indeed, our system can prevent any involved organization from launching masquerade attacks