CAREER: Secure and Trustworthy Provenance for Accountable Clouds

近年来，云计算已经成为最成功的计算模式之一。然而，由于缺乏问责制和不遵守数据保护法规，商业、医疗保健和国防组织等主要用户无法将云用于敏感数据和应用程序。由于缺乏有关云内部的信息以及无法执行可信审计，今天的云通常不用于受监管的行业，从而阻碍了它们的广泛采用。这个项目的主要焦点是通过利用数据、应用程序和云状态的来源或历史作为云的一等属性，使云更加可靠。云来源架构提供了收集、存储和保护来源的机制，并为来源创建了安全访问机制。我们使用OpenStack（一个流行的云平台）实现我们的架构，并使用标准基准来评估性能。基于安全来源的云在几个方面推进了最先进的技术：(i)它使云更加负责任、值得信赖和安全；（ii）导致大型组织更多地采用云；（iii）这最终降低了成本；（iv）它还为执法部门提供云中的数字取证调查支持；最后(v)它允许创新，例如新的身份验证和访问控制方案。这项研究伴随着一个综合的教育组成部分，包括开发新的课程、教科书和在线课程。该项目还包括对K-12、本科生、研究生和博士后研究人员的指导，夏令营，以及妇女和少数民族的积极参与，以增加我国劳动力的多样性。

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most successful computing models in recent years. However, lack of accountability and non-compliance with data protection regulations have prevented major users such as business, healthcare, and defense organizations from utilizing clouds for sensitive data and applications. Due to the lack of information about cloud internals and the inability to perform trustworthy audits, today's clouds are often not used in regulated industries, preventing their widespread adoption. The main focus of this project is to make clouds more accountable by leveraging provenance or the history of data, applications, and cloud state as a first-class property of clouds. The cloud provenance architecture provides mechanisms for collecting, storing, and securing provenance, and creating a secure access mechanism for provenance. We implement our architecture using OpenStack - a popular cloud platform - and use standard benchmarks to evaluate performance. A secure provenance based cloud advances the state-of-the-art in several ways: (i) it makes clouds more accountable, trustworthy, and secure; (ii) which leads to increased adoption of clouds by large organizations; (iii) this ultimately lowers the cost; (iv) it also provides law-enforcement with support for digital forensics investigations in clouds; and finally (v) it allows innovations such as novel authentication and access-control schemes. This research is accompanied by an integrated educational component, including development of new curricula, textbook, and an online course. The project also includes mentoring of K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers, summer camps, and active involvement of women and minorities in order to increase the diversity of our nation's workforce.