Expressing and Enforcing Location Requirements in the Cloud Using Information Flow Control

The adoption of cloud computing is increasing and its use is becoming widespread in many sectors. As cloud service provision increases, legal and regulatory issues become more significant. In particular, the international nature of cloud provision raises concerns over the location of data and the laws to which they are subject. In this paper we investigate Information Flow Control (IFC) as a possible technical solution to expressing, enforcing and demonstrating compliance of cloud computing systems with policy requirements inspired by data protection and other laws. We focus on geographic location of data, since this is the paradigmatic concern of legal/regulatory requirements on cloud computing and, to date, has not been met with robust technical solutions and verifiable data flow audit trails.