Secure Computing in the Cloud (Dagstuhl Seminar 11491)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 11491 ``Secure Computing in the Cloud''. Cloud Computing offers a lot of benefits for end customers: high-end machines, incredible amounts of storage, high availability and everything available at the touch of a button. In this seminar we concentrate on compute clouds: Clouds, that do not only offer storage but also computations that can be outsourced in form of virtual machines (VMs). Outsourcing computations as well as data to a third party, in this case the cloud provider, are accompanied by the qualms of confiding data to the cloud provider based on blindly trusted service level agreements. The participants of this seminar discuss the involved risks, create threat models as basic assumptions that describe the (un-)trusted entities and present solutions that augment trust in the cloud provider, the integrity and verifiability of computations and data processed in the cloud.