Revealing the Unseen: How to Expose Cloud Usage While Protecting User Privacy

TL;DR

This paper discusses balancing transparency of cloud infrastructure with user privacy, proposing a novel approach combining security technologies to reveal utilization data without compromising individual tenant privacy.

Contribution

It introduces a new method that enables cloud providers to expose infrastructure utilization while safeguarding tenant privacy through innovative security and privacy techniques.

Findings

Proposes a privacy-preserving approach for cloud transparency

Analyzes benefits and challenges of cloud usage transparency

Suggests technical solutions combining security technologies

Abstract

Cloud users have little visibility into the performance characteristics and utilization of the physical machines underpinning the virtualized cloud resources they use. This uncertainty forces users and researchers to reverse engineer the inner workings of cloud systems in order to understand and optimize the conditions their applications operate. At Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), as a public cloud operator, we'd like to expose the utilization of our physical infrastructure to stop this wasteful effort. Mindful that such exposure can be used maliciously for gaining insight into other users workloads, in this position paper we argue for the need for an approach that balances openness of the cloud overall with privacy for each tenant inside of it. We believe that this approach can be instantiated via a novel combination of several security and privacy technologies. We discuss the potential benefits, implications of transparency for cloud systems and users, and technical challenges/possibilities.