Assured Cloud Computing

Preface

Starting around 2009, higher bandwidth networks, low-cost commoditized computers and storage, hardware virtualization, large user populations, service-oriented architectures, and autonomic and utility computing together provided the foundation for a dramatic change in the scale at which computation could be provisioned and managed. Popularly, the resulting phenomenon became known as cloud computing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), tasked with addressing the phenomenon, defines it in the following way:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” [1]

In 2011, the U.S. Air Force, through the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), established the Assured Cloud Computing Center of Excellence (ACC-UCoE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to explore how cloud computing could be used to better support the computing and communication needs of the Air Force. The Center then pursued a broad program of collaborative research and development to address the core technical obstacles to the achievement of assured cloud computing, including ones related to design, formal analysis, runtime configuration, and experimental evaluation ...