Trusted Platform Module-Based Privacy in the Public Cloud: Challenges and Future Perspective

Public cloud providers offer ready-to-use, easily scalable servers on demand for a variety of applications. Storing and processing private and sensitive data in the cloud brings multiple security issues and indeed these concerns currently prevent many users from utilizing cloud resources. Improving both security and trust for users is increasingly important for cloud providers. In this context, we first investigate the classes of security threats encountered by cloud applications. We then analyze various software- and hardware-based solutions to handle these security challenges and provide the user with a chain of trust. Our analysis shows that pure software-based solutions do not sufficiently mitigate the challenges of the cloud environment. Hardware-based solutions utilizing the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) alleviate the issues; however, it is challenging to implement in the public cloud environment. Finally, we introduce our TPM-SGX-based approach that utilizes software TPM and Software Guard Extension (SGX) to provide similar security as the hardware-based approach.