Building Trust into Cloud Computing Using Virtualization of TPM

A key technology of cloud computing is virtualization, which can lead to reduce the total cost and increase the application flexibility. However along with these benefits come added security challenges. The extension of Trusted Computing to virtual environments can provide secure storage and ensure system integrity. In this paper, we describe and analyze several existing virtualization of TPM (vTPM) designs: software-based vTPM, hardware-based vTPM, para-virtualized TPM and property-based vTPM and analyze each of their limitations. We believe this to be an useful exercise to help better understand and apply the technology of virtualization of TPM in real cloud computing systems.