Improving the Security of Cloud Computing

On-demand cloud computing and data storage can save companies money, nevertheless many businesses—particularly in finance and health care—are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.

Amazon, in a move similar to ones made by other cloud providers, now offers a virtual private cloud service in which a customer is promised his own isolated server. Because clients are likely to want to confirm that they're getting what they paid for, a group of researchers at RSA Laboratories, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has developed a verification method that involves monitoring a piece of shared server hardware called the CPU cache, which allows quick access to frequently tapped memory resources. The prototype innovation lets a client monitor whether the CPU cache on its cloud server is doing anything beyond what would be expected by the client's own computation. Such a discovery would suggest that someone else is sharing the server. "This allows you to check on your situation in the cloud," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a coauthor of the paper that described the Amazon weakness. "It's a way of doing detection on when you to tell the truth have a physical server to yourself."