Strong Tenant Separation in Cloud Computing Platforms
Michael Pfeiffer, Michael Rossberg, Simon Buttgereit, Guenter Schaefer · 2019
Cloud computing, with its large, homogeneous infrastructures, has a high sensitivity to security incidents due to the multitude of affected services and tenants. To contain a potential attacker within a compromised subsystem, a strict separation between individual resources, e.g. virtual servers and networks, must be established. However, this separation usually relies on the integrity of the entire cloud platform. Due to the considerable size and complexity of the software powering these platforms and recently found attacks on hardware components, i.e. Spectre and Meltdown, this may not always represent a reasonable assumption.