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Adversaries in Clouds: Protecting Data in Cloud-Based Applications. Nick Feamster Georgia Tech. Building Applications on the Cloud. “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.” – Ken Thomson, Reflections on Trusting Trust.
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Adversaries in Clouds: Protecting Data in Cloud-Based Applications Nick FeamsterGeorgia Tech
Building Applications on the Cloud “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.” – Ken Thomson, Reflections on Trusting Trust • Used for a wide variety of services and applications • Built using a variety of technology • Programming languages • Web servers • Load balancers • Application frameworks • New opportunities for external adversaries • About 85% of data leaks occur due to external attacks at servers [Verizon data breach report]. • Existing attacks on software applications • But, applications are also hosted on untrusted platforms
Possible Defenses • Check the Web application for vulnerabilities • Doesn’t defend against zero-day attacks, programmer error, etc. • Must trust all underlying hardware and software infrastructure, as well • No protection once the account is compromised • Isolate each session in a virtual machine • Significant performance overhead
Protect the Data (in addition to the application) • Proposal: A data firewall for cloud-based Web applications • Apply network-level information flow control to data hosted by Web applications • Associate a taint with a piece of data (e.g., row in a database table) • Rewrite queries to retrieve taints with data • Propagate taints across processes and network • Perform IFC based on taints associated with data
New Adversary Models • The “foreign” code base is increasing • Application security is getting harder • Position: Protect the data, not just the application • Network-wide DLP could benefit cloud-based applications in other settings, too • Data isolation between multi-tenant application services