Revealing the unseen: how to expose cloud usage while protecting user privacy
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2017-11-18
Authors
Turk, Ata
Varia, M.
Kellaris, Georgios
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Ata Turk, M. Varia, Georgios Kellaris. 2017. "Revealing the Unseen: How to Expose Cloud Usage While Protecting User Privacy." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8215777/. 10th International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS). New Orleans, LA, 2017-11-18 - 2017-11-18. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW.2017.143
Abstract
Cloud users have little visibility into the performance characteristics and utilization of the physical machines underpinning the virtualized cloud resources they use. This uncertainty forces users and researchers to reverse engineer the inner workings of cloud systems in order to understand and optimize the conditions their applications operate. At Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), as a public cloud operator, we'd like to expose the utilization of our physical infrastructure to stop this wasteful effort. Mindful that such exposure can be used maliciously for gaining insight into other user's workloads, in this position paper we argue for the need for an approach that balances openness of the cloud overall with privacy for each tenant inside of it. We believe that this approach can be instantiated via a novel combination of several security and privacy technologies. We discuss the potential benefits, implications of transparency for cloud systems and users, and technical challenges/possibilities.