Proof-carrying cloud computation: The case of convex optimization

Abstract

Cloud computing provides a “pay-per-use” utility service which offers the customer the economical access to large amount of computing resources with minimal management overhead. Despite the tremendous benefits, computation outsourcing also eliminates the customer's ultimate control over the data computation process, which makes securing cloud computation an imperative and challenging task, especially in the aspect of integrity verification. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose to research on integrity verification mechanisms for secure outsourced computations in cloud computing. In particular, we focus on outsourcing the widely applicable engineering optimization problem, i.e., convex optimization, and aim to investigate efficient integrity verification mechanisms using application-specific techniques. Our security design does not require the use of heavy cryptographic tools. Instead, we leverage the inherent structure of the optimization problems and the proof-carrying characteristics of the solving algorithms to achieve efficient integrity verification. The proposed design provides substantial computational savings on the customer side and introduce marginal overhead on the cloud side. We further prove its correctness and soundness. The extensive experiments under real cloud environment show our mechanisms ensure strong integrity assurance with high efficiency on both the customer and cloud sides and are readily applicable in practice.