Hyperdrive: A flexible cloud testbed for research and education

Today, cloud computing is of paramount importance and is widely used. There have been many works illustrating the potential of narrowly focused security attacks against cloud systems, as well as elaborate mitigation techniques. However, the understanding of the implications of these attacks and mitigations on practical cloud systems as a whole, remains limited. One of the reasons is the difficulty and cost of control of the environment, reproducibility of experiments, and flexibility in reconfiguration to different cloud systems. In this work we present “hyperdrive”, a highly reconfigurable cloud testbed to support research and education in experimentally assessing the practical impact of attacks and mitigations on realistic cloud systems. The testbed can be used for research activities to evaluate the performance of mitigation techniques spanning crypto-based privacy-preserving cloud computation, and applied system security research focusing on side channel attacks, and stealthy data exfiltration. The proposed testbed can also be used for education within the context of the cloud security course and projects.