myTrustedCloud: Towards a virtual private cloud

The current profusion of cloud infrastructures, built both within the public but also private space have enabled a significant body of research to move their computational requirements into this new paradigm. There are though a collection of usecases that are not able to make use of this new paradigm though it is clear that this would improve the provision of computational and data resources available to them. With the pilot energy applications that we are going to use, looking at the provision of Advanced Metering Infrastructure, Condition Monitoring and Distributed State Estimation we will prove that the utilisation of hardware trust within the system for attestation of state and identification of both the data and algorithms and their hosting virtual instances would mean that this high value critically important system could utilise cloud computing.Specific outputs will also include a detailed threat analysis of using IaaS cloud systems and the specific countermeasures that trusted platform allow within the system, an exemplar software framework in which energy researchers are able to start making use of commercially sensitive information while at the same time make full use of cloud computing. This framework will be documented such that other research areas will also be able to make use of the findings within the project in such sensitive areas as medical and social research, both of whom have traditionally extremely tight restrictions on data.

This project has the possibility of having significant impact, to the research community, to the pilot use-case community (the energy distribution community) and the IT service provider community. - The research community will be able to prove that the distributed computing paradigm is suitable to be used in high trust requiring applications. - The Energy sector will be able to utilise cutting edge computational infrastructure and benefit from the lower costs of not having to use private network circuits that they have to maintain independent of load - The IT outsourcing community will be able to open up new markets, providing specific services to the energy industry. Other research and data integrity requiring communities will be able to follow the lead set by the energy industry in utilising externally provided services whilst still maintaining the ability to ensure that vital data remains private to themselves even if it is physically sitting on an external providers systems.