Trusted Block as a Service: Towards Sensitive Applications on the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing grows rapidly as today's advanced information technology. However, by allowing outsourcing computation on the Cloud, users risk of disclosing privacy and obtaining forged results. These potential threats block sensitive applications to join the Cloud. In this paper, we characterize sensitive applications on the Cloud (SAND) problem and define two critical security requirements: confidentiality and verifiability. The former refers to the protection of sensitive programs/data from disclosing to other users or even the Cloud administrators. The latter concerns with user's capability to verify whether computing results are faithfully calculated. To address SAND, we propose a new Cloud model, Trusted Block as a Service (TBaaS), to provide a confidential and verifiable environment for each sensitive application. TBaaS limits Cloud provider's access of sensitive applications while granting user the ability to verify whether the computation is faithfully carried out. Moreover, it offers high flexibility and low performance overhead.