Secure Partitioning of Composite Cloud Applications

The security of Cloud applications is always a major concern for application developers and operators. Protecting their users’ data confidentiality requires methods to avoid leakage from vulnerable software and unreliable cloud providers. Recently, hardware-based technologies emerged in the Cloud setting to isolate applications from the privileged access of cloud providers. One of those technologies is the Separation Kernel which aims at isolating safely the software components of applications. In this article, we propose a declarative methodology supported by a running prototype to determine the partitioning of a Cloud multi-component application in order to allow its placement on a Separation Kernel. We employ information-flow security techniques to determine how to partition the application, and showcase the methodology and prototype over a motivating scenario from an IoT application deployed to a central Cloud.