Configuring Cloud Deployments for Integrity

Many cloud vendors now provide pre-configured OS distributions and network firewall policies to simplify deployment for customers. However, even with this help, customers have little insight into the possible attack paths that adversaries may use to compromise the integrity of their computations on the cloud. In this paper, we leverage the pre-configured security policies for cloud instances to compute the integrity protection required to protect cloud deployments. In particular, we show that it is possible to compute security configurations for cloud instance deployments that can prevent information flow integrity errors and that these configurations can be measured into attestations using trusted computing hardware. We apply these proposed methods to the OpenStack cloud platform, showing how web server application instance can be configured to protect their integrity in the cloud and how integrity measurement can be used to validate such configurations for approximately 3% overhead.