A basic security concern inherent to outsourced computating services is guaranteeing the integrity of the information received from the cloud. The concern relates both to outsourced data storage and to the results of outsourced computations. There are several aspects to this problem like ensuring software correctness, protecting against intentional deviation and shortcuts, maintaining data provenance, and guaranteeing results of distributed computation from mutually distrusted sources. Moreover, it is not enough to provide separate guarantees on each axis, solutions to these concerns must compose. This proposal concentrates on the design of mechanisms that enable clients to verify the correctness of the results of outsourced computations, authenticity and provenance of remotely stored data, and the combination of the two. Particular emphasis is given to mechanisms that provide composable security guarantees, where one can combine the security properties of several individual mechanisms to a joint, holistic security guarantee, and furthermore make informed and meaningful tradeoffs between performance and verifiability. These new abilities are bound to greatly enhance the acceptance and usefulness of cloud computing, and in particular open it up to new classes of applications and markets.
EAGER: Holistic Security for Cloud Computing: Verifiable Computation