TC:Large:Collaborative Research: Towards Trustworthy Interactions in the Cloud

作为信息技术中最有前途的新兴概念之一，外包计算（也称为云计算）正在改变我们对IT消费和管理方式的看法，从而提高了成本效率，并提供了灵活的按需可伸缩性。云计算通过一组快速增长的基础设施、平台和服务提供商，将IT资源和服务减少为按需购买和付费的商品。尽管云计算的增长相对较快，并且越来越多地采用云计算，但我们对云计算的安全性、隐私性和经济价值主张的理解——以及因此我们信任云计算的能力——仍然缺乏。本项目通过以下方式应对这一挑战：(a)扩展云服务水平协议，以管理外包服务的完整性、信息泄漏控制和公平市场定价等方面；(b)制定机制，使提供者能够保证和用户能够核查这种增强信任的服务水平协议是否得到遵守；(c)以既实用又可用的方式向云计算客户和系统集成商提供可信度保证和权衡。在这个项目中进行的研究工作是及时的，因为它尽早解决了云可信度问题，以避免各种利益相关者之间的冲突不受限制地发展——就像几十年前互联网的情况一样。这样做有可能提高我们网络基础设施的实用性和硬度，对我们的经济和社会有重大好处。该项目最终将导致一个更好的计算资源市场，在这个市场中，用户可以确信他们获得的服务满足了他们对性能、安全性和隐私的期望。

As one of the most promising emerging concepts in Information Technology, outsourced computation (also known as cloud computing) is transforming our perception of how IT is consumed and managed, yielding improved cost efficiencies and delivering flexible, on-demand scalability. Cloud computing reduces IT resources and services to commodities acquired and paid-for on-demand through a fast-growing set of infrastructure, platform, and service providers.Despite the relatively fast growth and increased adoption of clouds, our understanding of aspects related to their security, privacy, and economic value proposition -- and hence our ability to trust them -- is lacking. This project addresses this challenge by (a) extending cloud service-level agreements to govern aspects such as integrity of outsourced services, information leakage control, and fair market pricing; (b) developing mechanisms that allow providers to guarantee and users to verify that such trust-enhancing service-level agreements are being followed; and (c) exposing trustworthiness guarantees and tradeoffs to cloud customers and system integrators in ways that are both practical and usable.The research work pursued in this project is timely as it addresses the issues of cloud trustworthiness early enough to avoid having the conflicts among its various stakeholders develop unchecked -- as was the case with the Internet decades ago. Doing so has the potential of improving the utility and hardness of our cyber-infrastructure, with significant benefit to our economy and society. The project will ultimately lead to a better marketplace for computing resources, in which users are assured that the services they acquire satisfy their performance, security, and privacy expectations.