Improving Trust in Cloud, Enterprise, and Mobile Computing Platforms

To realize both these goals, we propose several novel systems. For cloud platforms, we present Excalibur, a system that enables building trusted cloud services. Such services give cloud customers the ability to process data privately in the cloud, and to attest that the respective data protection mechanisms are deployed. Attestation is made possible by the use of trusted computing hardware placed on the cloud nodes. For enterprise platforms, we propose an OS security model-the broker security model-aimed at providing information security against a negligent or malicious system administrator while letting him retain most of the flexibility to manage the OS. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this model by building BrokULOS, a proof-of-concept instantiation of this model for Linux. For mobile platforms, we present the Trusted Language Runtime (TLR), a software system for hosting mobile apps with stringent security needs (e.g., e-wallet). The TLR leverages ARM TrustZone technology to protect mobile apps from OS security breaches.