TWC: Small: Collaborative: Towards Agile and Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing

云计算为用户提供了许多好处，包括提高资源的可用性和灵活性，以及设备的效率。然而，隐私问题正成为用户向云计算过渡的主要障碍。现有云平台的权限设计给云管理员赋予了过多的权限，在确保云的可信性方面带来了很大的挑战，云管理员可能会通过滥用管理权限发动严重的内部攻击。这个项目在云平台的架构设计中使用了一个众所周知的理念——特权分离。架构设计和强同态加密方法从不同角度保护了云环境中的数据隐私。该项目开发了一种创新的隐私驱动架构设计，其中一个重点是云平台每个软件组件的特权级设计，另一个重点是防御内部攻击。该项目研究新的机制，以取消云管理员的特权，并在云平台的软件组件之间实现更细粒度的访问控制。更具体地说，新机制支持平台的敏捷配置；用户可配置隐私保护；在用户空间中具有很强的隔离性。随着用户将更多的数据放到云中，并依赖云提供商来保护这些数据的私密性，在这个项目下开发的技术非常重要。

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.This project uses a well-understood philosophy, separation-of-privilege, in the architectural design of a cloud platform. The architectural design and the strong homomorphic cryptographic approach protect data privacy in cloud environments from different angles. This project develops an innovative privacy-driven architectural design, with one focus on the privilege-level design of each software component of a cloud platform, and another on defending insider attacks. This project investigates new mechanisms to de-privilege the cloud administrator and enable more fine grained access control among the software components of a cloud platform. More specifically, the new mechanisms enable agile configuration of the platform; user-configurable privacy protection; and strong isolation in the user space. The techniques developed under this project are immensely important as users place more of their data into the cloud and rely upon cloud providers to keep that data private.