A Secure Cloud with Minimal Provider Trust

TL;DR

Bolted introduces a secure bare metal cloud architecture enabling tenants to maintain control and security similar to private data centers, with scalable security and minimal overhead.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture that isolates tenants and allows them to control security tradeoffs, enhancing security in cloud environments.

Findings

Prototype demonstrates scalable end-to-end security.

Achieves security with small overhead.

Tenants control security, price, and performance tradeoffs.

Abstract

Bolted is a new architecture for a bare metal cloud with the goal of providing security-sensitive customers of a cloud the same level of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. It allows tenants to elastically allocate secure resources within a cloud while being protected from other previous, current, and future tenants of the cloud. The provisioning of a new server to a tenant isolates a bare metal server, only allowing it to communicate with other tenant's servers once its critical firmware and software have been attested to the tenant. Tenants, rather than the provider, control the tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. A prototype demonstrates scalable end-to-end security with small overhead compared to a less secure alternative.