Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have outlined a that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines." Such a platform would assure customers that service providers haven't been messing with their data and would enable service providers to secure data even across many VMs. The researchers, in a paper titled "Towards Trusted Cloud Computing," acknowledge that details of how cloud providers set up their data centers is held pretty close to the vest, but base their system on an open source offering called Eucalyptus that they suspect is similar to at least some commercial implementations. A prototype based on the design is this research team's next step.
cloud computing project topic
