file.pdf (1.92 MB)
Privacy-Sensitive VM Retrospection
journal contribution
posted on 1994-03-01, 00:00 authored by Wolfgang Richter, Glenn Ammons, Jan Harkes, Adam Goode, Nilton Bila, Vasanth Bala, Mahadev SatyanarayananThe success of cloud computing leads to large, centralized collections of virtual machine (VM) images. The ability to retrospect (examine the historical state of) these images at a high semantic level can be valuable in many aspects of IT management such as debugging and troubleshooting, software quality control, legal establishment of data or code provenance, and cyber forensics such as malware tracking and licensing violations. In this paper, we explore the privacy implications of VM retrospection. We argue that retrospection will worsen current concerns about privacy in cloud computing. We develop privacysensitive requirements for the design of a retrospection mechanism, and then show how they can be met in a functional prototype.