A user-specific trusted virtual environment for cloud computing

Cloud computing is a new computing model that provides users multiple isolated execution environments, usually referred to as Virtual Machine (VMs), on a single host. But the model that all users' data place in the cloud brings a significant level of risk on the privacy, for example, the data in the cloud could be tampered or abused by malicious customers. So, the trustworthy of the VMs becomes a significant hurdle for mainstream cloud adoption, especially for critical or sensitive applications. In this study, we apply Trusted Computing technology into the Cloud computing infrastructure, design a multi-source trust chain model, a Tree-like Trust Chain for VMs (TTCVM), which provides VMs with two trust sources, trust from the host and trust from the user. A user-specific virtual TPM, μTPM, is proposed using the TPM virtualization which aggregates the two trusts and forwards them to the user VM. Formal analysis demonstrates that TTCVM provides users the visibility and configurability into security settings of his execution environment. © 2031 Asian Network for Scientific Information.