Name of the participant: Robert Buhren
Description of the IT research project: Cloud computing is an indispensable factor in today’s digital world. Providers of cloud solutions can make their computing capacity available to their customers on-demand. This allows efficient use of existing resources and enables companies to realise a high-availability solution for their application without having to make large investments in their own hardware.
For the cloud customer, this also results in disadvantages, as the processing of their data now takes place on systems that are not under their direct control. In order to process sensitive data in a cloud, it is crucial to trust the cloud provider. It is particularly difficult to establish this trust with providers that operate internationally, as these providers may be subject to jurisdictions that are not compatible with German or European law. Progressive digitalisation, e.g. in areas of industry, is leading to a further shift of critical applications to cloud providers.
This environment places high demands on data security and integrity, as attacks or errors can even cause physical damage. With Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, AMD offers a solution to this problem. With SEV, the memory of virtual machines is encrypted and thus protected from unauthorised access. Within the scope of this project, the SEV technology was subjected to a security analysis. In the process, several vulnerabilities were discovered, both of a conceptual nature and in the concrete implementation.
Software Campus partners: TU Berlin, Huawei
Implementation period: 01.03.2018 – 31.12.2019