Why do we need the trusted cloud?
And shouldn’t real trust go beyond that?
As digitization has picked up speed over the last decades, the word “trust” has become more and more important and taken on a whole new meaning in the era of cloud computing. Business needs drive companies to transfer as many processes as possible to the digital space inevitably creating millions of petabytes of data. To handle data loads of such size, businesses rely on the cloud. But, handling such massive amounts of data, varying widely in type and source, is a huge challenge for today’s cloud environments. This challenge combined with security incidents making headlines every day makes companies rightfully skeptical about the cloud and how their customers and enterprise data is managed. Most importantly they ask: How secure is my data when stored in the cloud ?
So, what is a “trusted cloud”?
To ensure the confidentiality and integrity of your company’s data, cloud providers must take appropriate measures to guarantee data security to their customers. As a first step they should have processes in place that guarantee proper monitoring and, when needed, immediate alerts in case of any data policy violations. A trusted cloud provides all the privacy and control choices to their customers and guarantees that only the customer retains control of their data and any access protocols and permissions that apply. Government and legal regulations also affect the practicability of enforcing data confidentiality as providers might be forced by federal and state agencies to give access to company data. All a cloud provider can do then is to inform the user about such a breach happening.
In summary, today’s trusted cloud is following these key principles:
Data ownership
The data always belongs to the customer, even if they decide to transfer to any other service.
Limited access to customer data
No employee should be able to gain access to the data, except for emergencies like support cases (actually nobody but the owner should usually get access, but this limitation applies in today’s trusted clouds).
No transfer to third parties
Cloud providers shall not use customer data to exploit them for any other purposes, for instance in order to improve their marketing processes.
Transparency
The customers shall be able to identify where data is stored and who has access to it any time.
These guidelines are pretty hard to check (and enforce) by the customer because most of them are internal policies put in place by the providers and invisible to users. Although there are several different certification standards like ISO27001 and audit rights are in place, the customer still needs to trust the provider that they are executing everything as outlined in the user agreement.
Why should you think about going beyond the trusted cloud?
As described, trusted clouds rely in general on policies and standards that cover technical and organizational procedures to protect your data. It really comes down to the old concept of you trusting your business partner — considering what’s at stake, that just might not be enough.
We believe that today’s security breaches and increasing awareness of privacy demands more sophisticated measures to protect confidential data. For instance, Intel introduced SGX (Software Guard Extensions). While processing data, the CPU loads this data in-memory and runs program instructions to manipulate the data. While in traditional systems the memory could be accessed by other potentially malicious processes, SGX introduced special memory areas, called enclaves, that are access protected and can only be used by authorized processes. In practice this means that even when you are running on the cloud your risk of another cloud user accessing your data is minimized.
Although advancements in this area are a step forward and help increase trust, handling sensible customer data like health records requires thinking out of the box.
The basic principles for the current encryption and security algorithms are generally pretty old and widely used by technical experts and security engineers. Nevertheless, effectively applying those techniques to end user data and to the cloud often fails due to the inherent complexity of using cryptography.
Only the use of mathematically secure algorithms could overcome the lack of trust in public clouds. Let us call clouds that use end-to-end encryption while transferring and storing data Crypto Clouds. Only a Crypto Cloud allows you to know that your data is secure like it never left your device providing ultimate assurance to the customer.
Crypto Clouds by definition are not able to gain access to your data at any time! From a technical perspective it is impossible to unpack your sealed customer and enterprise data.
One example of such a Crypto Cloud is Bdrive, designed and built in partnership by neXenio and the German federal mint. As Crypto Clouds and the used client software can tend to lack in user acceptance, user friendliness is key and Bdrive tackles this challenge by executing Security by Design in a tight collaboration with UX experts and users themselves.
Using Crypto Clouds you can handle your data with the highest possible level of security. Your data is encrypted with private keys (keys unique to your device) and the confidentiality of these is as crucial as the data itself. Access to your data is limited to those devices with the right private key. However, encrypting data also has its limitations in terms of feasible operations. As of today, Crypto Clouds cannot be used to outsource analytics or other computations. This might change in the future. Current research on homomorphic encryption shows that simple operations can also be executed.
Trusted clouds give you policies and procedures that secure your data from external access. Crypto Clouds go several steps further and secure your data using cryptography. In this way it becomes technically impossible to access your data because the effort for an attacker goes far beyond simply gaining access to data stored in the clouds.
Are you interested in using or creating secure software with us? We are always looking for customers, partners and motivated engineers. Get in touch at nexenio.com.
