Systems

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.

A defining characteristic of modern personal computing is the trend towards extensible platforms (e.g., smartphones and tablets) that run a large number of specialized applications, many of uncertain quality or provenance. The common security mechanisms available on these platforms are application isolation and permission systems. Unfortunately, it has been repeatedly shown that these mechanisms fail to prevent a range of misbehaviors, including privilege-escalation attacks and information-flow leakage.