Trusted Launch of Generic Virtual Machine Images in Public IaaS Environments

Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are emerging and promising technologies, however their faster-pased adoption is hampered by data security concerns. In the same time, Trusted Computing (TC) is experiencing a revived interest as a security mechanism for IaaS. We address the lack of an implementable mechanism to ensure the launch of a virtual machine (VM) instance on a trusted remote host. Relying on Trusted Platform Modules operations such as binding and sealing to provide integrity guarantees for clients that require a trusted VM launch, we have designed a trusted launch protocol for generic VM images in public IaaS environments. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of the protocol based on OpenStack, an open-source IaaS platform. The results provide a basis for use of TC mechanisms within IaaS platforms and pave the way for a wider applicability of TC to IaaS security.