Split-Cloud for Enabling Trust (SCEnT)

ABSTRACT: AIS proposes Split-Cloud for Enabling Trust (SCEnT), a Phase I SBIR effort to determine the feasibility of providing trust in a shared/public cloud environment. Current options for providing networked applications require making significant trade-offs: either the cost of private in-house hosting, or the loss of trust and control when outsourcing to the public cloud. The AF and DoD require the ability to get the best of both worlds, a cheaper, outsourced cloud without giving up the control over applications. SCEnT aims to explore leveraging cloud-scale end-to-end trust (EtET) in a split-cloud architecture to provide a more secure cloud. End-to-end trust is a concept where computers automatically establish trust relations between themselves and prevent dataflow to compromised or untrusted systems. The SCEnT split-cloud study could scale EtET to the cloud. A split-cloud architecture is where a single instance of a server is kept in-house and protected while the rest of the instances are outsourced to the cloud. The in-house server is used as a"gold standard"for trustworthiness, and through EtET, bootstrap and monitor trust in the cloud. The SCEnT effort will provide a roadmap for future research driving adoption of a more secure cloud platform for cost savings across the AF and DoD. BENEFIT: The SCEnT capability will allow cloud application managers to ensure their users are not exposed to compromised instances. The split-cloud provides the ability to get the best of both worlds, the security of in-house hosting, and the cost savings and scalability of the cloud. SCEnT protects sensitive data on a cloud infrastructure that may or may not be under physical control and permits automatic partitioning of instances based on trust. The technology will provide a method to perform privacy-protecting trust measurements of cloud instances and define a cross-domain information path. The resulting capability will ensure that the United States Government and Private Sector retain control over their cloud instances and that their critical operations do not cease when cloud architectures are compromised.