Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing

Abstract– Cloud computing has emerged as a dominant platform for computing for the foreseeable future, resulting in an ongoing disruption to the way we build and deploy software. This disruption offers a rare opportunity to integrate new approaches to computer security. In this paper we outline a vision of security in this new era of cloud computing, laying out an argument for how the aggregating effect of cloud computing and the role of cloud providers as trust anchors can significantly benefit computing security. We advocate for new cloud services that take as a primary goal the security of cloud tenants and illustrate several examples that might help solve “holy-grail” problems such as password security, trust management, server defense, and practical trustworthy computing via attested code identity. To motivate additional research on such cloud-as-partner mechanisms, we enumerate a number of challenging concrete open problems faced by cloud customers today.