Silver Lining: Enforcing Secure Information Flow at the Cloud Edge

SilverLine is a novel, exceptionally modular framework for enforcing mandatory information flow policies for Java computations on commodity, data-processing, Platform-as-a-Service clouds by leveraging Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and In-lined Reference Monitors (IRMs). Unlike traditional system-level approaches, which typically require modifications to the cloud kernel software, OS/hypervisor, VM, or cloud file system, SilverLine automatically in-lines secure information flow tracking code into untrusted Java binaries as they arrive at the cloud. This facilitates efficient enforcement of a large, flexible class of information flow and mandatory access control policies without any customization of the cloud or its underlying infrastructure. The cloud and the enforcement framework can therefore be maintained completely separately and orthogonally (i.e., modularly). To demonstrate the approach's feasibility, a prototype implements and deploys SilverLine on a real-world data processing cloud-Hadoop MapReduce. Evaluation results demonstrate that SilverLine provides inter-process information flow security for Hadoop clouds with easy maintainability (through modularity) and low overhead.