Technology for Trusted Cloud Security: Survey and Open Issues

Trusted execution technology is increasingly successful in heterogeneous fields aiming at securing the execution of code and access control to premium content, though some criticalities associated with such technologies start becoming apparent. Among other stakeholders, the Cloud Security Alliance, whose mission is to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, offers cloud providers and clients with security models and tools that ease security management. This chapter highlights promising technology such as containers and their security aspects. It surveys trusted computing technologies, highlighting the pros and cons of established technologies and novel approaches, as well as the security issues that such approaches introduce ex novo or simply exacerbate. The chapter surveys some relevant, trusted computing environment solutions, such as SGX and containers. It shows how the cloud can make use of the analyzed trusted execution technology to help secure the execution of code and protect access to data.