A Run-Time Framework for Ensuring Zero-Trust State of Client’s Machines in Cloud Environment

Abstract

With the unprecedented demand for cloud computing, ensuring trust in the underlying environment is challenging. Applications executing in the cloud are prone to attacks of different types including malware, network and data manipulation. These attacks may remain undetected for a significant length of time thus causing a lack of trust. Untrusted cloud services can also lead to business losses in many cases and therefore need urgent attention. In this paper, we present Trusted Public Cloud (TPC), a generic framework ensuring the Zero-trust security of client machine. It tracks the system state, alerting the user of unexpected changes in the machine’s state, thus increasing the run-time detection of security vulnerabilities. We validated TPC on Microsoft Azure with Local, Software Trusted Platform Module (SWTPM) and Software Guard Extension (SGX)-enabled SWTPM security providers. We also evaluated the scalability of TPC on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a varying number of client machines executing in a concurrent environment. The execution results show the effectiveness of TPC as it takes a maximum of 35.6 seconds to recognise the system state when there are 128 client machines attached.