Hardware-enhanced security for cloud computing

Cloud computing has ushered in an era where cloud customers are able to rapidly access on-demand computing resources made available by third party cloud providers. The cloud providers who maintain these computing resources and lease them out to customers leverage economies of scale and sharing of resources to be able to provide these resources to customers at favorable prices. Cloud computing and this sharing of resources, however, introduces a number of security concerns. These concerns include other, potentially malicious, customers who are co-located on the same system as the customer; or even untrusted system software running on the remote systems where a customer's code and data execute or reside. To tackle these security concerns, we explore how secure hardware architectures can provide more protections to a customer's code and data in a cloud computing setting. In particular, we want to show that with hardware enhancements we can make computing in the cloud as secure as in your own dedicated facilities.