Privacy-Aware Job Submission in the Cloud

The services offered by cloud computing are provided to individuals and organizations by varied shared resources which are forming the hardware layer of cloud data centers. Cloud users do not deal or interact directly with those resources, instead, they deal with the virtualized version of them, in other words, users deal with the virtualization layer which conceals to a great extent the specifics of the physical hardware layer. Based on the virtualization concept, more than one virtual machine can be co-hosted on the same physical machine. In spite of the wide range of benefits, co-hosting virtual machines on the same host comes with privacy and security threats. From one side, cloud providers are serving the virtual machines without being aware of their contents. On the other side, once cloud users submit their jobs to be serviced in the cloud, they lose their control on their jobs' sensitive information. Thus, cloud users' hesitation from moving to the cloud is logical since their sensitive jobs' content leakage or misuse is possible, especially when cloud services are not designed with privacy considerations. This paper proposes an approach to make the jobs with sensitive information more secure when submitted to the cloud environment. The core idea of the approach is to request the inclusion of the privacy specification of a set of one or more provider services in the Service Level Agreement contract.