Abstract. The continuing advancements in microprocessor technologies are putting more and more computing power into small devices. Today smartphones are especially popular. Nevertheless, for resource intensive tasks such devices are still too constrained. However, the simultaneous trend of providing computing resources as a commodity on a pay-as-yougo basis (cloud computing) combined with such mobile devices facilitates interesting applications: Mobile clients can simply outsource resource intensive tasks to the cloud. Since clients have to pay a cloud provider (CP) for consumed resources, e.g. instance hours of virtual machines, clients may consider it as privacy intrusive that the CP is able to record the activity pattern of users, i.e. how often and how much resources are consumed by a specific client. In this paper we present a solution to this dilemma which allows clients to anonymously consume resources of a CP such that the CP is not able to track users' activity patterns. We present a scenario which integrates up-to-date security enhanced platforms as processing nodes and a recent cloud payment scheme together with a concrete implementation supporting the practicality of the proposed approach.
Abstract. Over the past years, many different approaches and concepts in order to increase computer security have been presented. One of the most promising of these concepts is Trusted Computing which offers various services and functionalities like reporting and verifying the integrity and the configuration of a platform (attestation). The idea of reporting a platform's state and configuration to a challenger opens new and innovative ways of establishing trust relationships between entities. However, common applications are not aware of Trusted Computing facilities and are therefore not able to utilise Trusted Computing services at the moment. Hence, this article proposes an architecture that enables arbitrary applications to perform remote platform attestation, allowing them to establish trust based on their current configuration. The architecture's components discussed in this article are also essential parts of the OpenTC proof-of-concept prototype. It demonstrates applications and techniques of the Trusted Computing Group's proposed attestation mechanism in the area of personal electronic transactions.
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