A Software Architecture for Introducing Trust in Java-Based Clouds

The distributed software paradigms of grid and cloud computing offer massive computational power at commodity prices. Unfortunately, a number of security risks exist. In this paper we propose a software architecture which leverages the Trusted Computing principle of Remote Attestation to assess the trustworthiness of nodes in computing clouds. We combine hardware-security based on the Trusted Platform Module and Intel Trusted Execution Technology with an integrity-guaranteeing virtualization platform. Cloud services are offered by an easy-to-use Java middleware that performs role based access control and trust decisions hidden from the developer.