MRI: Development of an Instrument for Assured Cloud Computing

University Of Texas At Dallas, Richardson TX

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal #: 12-29652 PI(s): Kahn, Latifur R.; Hamlen, Kevin; Kantarcioglu, Murat Institution: University of Texas - Dallas Title: MRI/Dev.: An Instrument for Assured Cloud Computing Project Proposed: This project, building an assured cloud computing instrument, serves as an assured cloud to store, manage, query, and analyze massive amounts of relational, as well as textual, imagery, and video data. The instrument, consisting of secure virtual machine monitoring, secure storage management, and secure data management services, provides support for scaling applications such as - Secure social networking, - Malware detection, - Data provenance management, - Policy management, - Privacy preserving analysis, - Ontology alignment, and - Assured information sharing. It supports fine-grained access control, storage of encrypted and sensitive data, complex query processing for massive data sets, and authentication mechanisms. The instrumentation will be mainly utilized by research projects on privacy, assured information sharing, and reference monitoring in the School of Engineering and Computer Science in collaboration with scientist from Economics, Policy and Political Science, Management, Natural Science, and Mathematics at the institution. Additionally, the instrument will be available for use by researchers in the combined technology program between School of Arts and Humanities and Engineering. Moreover, it will be available to researchers in national and international academic, industrial, and governmental institutions. Broader Impacts: Researchers at the institution currently work in the area sponsored by NSF, AFOSR, NIH, DARPA, and Army. All this sponsored research can gain by having the cloud instrument be secured for many applications. Both research and education projects have a strong need to process massive amounts of data securely, for example, encrypted data for research on secure multi-party computation techniques, where large amounts of semantic web data have to be exchanged securely among multiple parties for assured information sharing among coalition partners. The education courses involve experimentation with malware detection tools and distributed forensics on the cloud. The instrument will be made available to multiple departments and have applications in several domains including science and engineering, healthcare, homeland security, defense and intelligence, law enforcement, space, banking and finance, power management, and environmental protection. Consequently, it will benefit the national community such as the open science research community.