Security of applications and their data is of immediate concern to almost all organisations that use cloud computing. This is particularly true for organisations that must comply with strict security policies, including those which process personal data and those supporting society’s most critical infrastructures, such as finance, utilities, health care and smart grids.
Critical infrastructure operators have legitimate concerns about the dependability of applications hosted in third-party clouds: cloud providers are already struggling to give strong security guarantees. The lack of adequate dependability, however, is increasingly becoming the primary barrier to the broad adoption of cloud computing, not only in the critical infrastructure domain but also in all domains in which the survival of a company depends on the reliability of the cloud. Hence, the cloud becomes itself a critical infrastructure for which we need to guarantee sufficient dependability such that we can justifiably place our trust in the hosted applications.
The SecureCloud project (
https://www.securecloudproject.eu/(si apre in una nuova finestra)) aims to remove technical impediments to dependable cloud computing, i.e. SecureCloud will ensure the security of applications and their data.
The provided SecureCloud platform is an ecosystem of cloud facilities characterized by superior security guarantees, providing protection from attacks by privileged users (e.g. the cloud provider or the system administrator) and software (e.g. the hypervisor). Protection relies on new security extensions recently introduced into commercially available off-the-shelf CPUs. The current implementation is based on Intel SGX, but support for additional platforms might become available in the future. SecureCloud is customizable, since it enables developers to build a cloud-based computing environment based on SGX-enabled containers that matches their personal preferences. SecureCloud is modular, because it allows developers to pick and use only the features that they need/want. SecureCloud is flexible, since it can satisfy a wide range of customers-specific requirements including big data processing, secure intra-cloud communication, precise microservice scheduling and reliable data storage. SecureCloud is interoperable, in that its facilities can be seamlessly integrated with best of breed offerings from the Open Source community.
