Conceptualized Policy Design for User-Regulated Trusted Clouds

The term "trust" in the area of cloud computing has always been one of the most problematic issues. The cloud user becomes willing to accept insecure conditions and unconsciously increases these conditions' security level if he is able to find a strategy that provides trust. This level of trust, once established, is difficult to maintain if any deception takes place. The indications of proven trust can only be seen in future usage of a cloud service. For this reason, specific control instruments are required to ascertain the accuracy of one's trust. The establishment of trust in a public cloud environment requires a paradigm change: a holistic strategy that enforces regulation requirements throughout the cloud architecture. The movement of the root of trust into hardware reduces vulnerability to compromise, as hardware attacks require a high expenditure of time and effort. Cloud users would define regulation standards through trust-worthy IT instruments and enforce them in specific cloud-service layers. The extension of this approach is the regulation of SaaS-based applications to enforce requirements for separation and availability. This work introduces a conceptual approach to establish a chain of policy by using hardware-oriented root of trust. The conceptual description of a chain of policy outlines the main principles to enforce regulations accurately for each architectural cloud layer based on an established chain of trust.