Isolated Virtual Environments for Secure Multi-Tenant Cloud
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Solution Overview
Problem
In cloud computing environments, there is a risk of customer data insecurity due to shared resources being used by multiple customers, especially when the service is provided by a third party without full control over the resources, leading to potential data exposure between different customer sessions.
Innovation Solution
An intermediary service manages a pool of isolated virtual environments, allocating them to clients as needed, ensuring that customer data is stored locally in memory and deleted at the end of each session, preventing data sharing between sessions and providing a secure, dedicated-like environment without the need for persistent storage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If shared resources are used to provide cloud services to multiple customers, then resource utilization and scalability are improved, but data security and isolation between customers deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the shared computing resource into multiple isolated virtual environments (containers), each assigned to a specific customer session. This segmentation allows the shared resource to serve multiple customers simultaneously while maintaining strict isolation between them, preventing data leakage while maximizing resource utilization.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a session manager as an intermediary layer between customers and the shared computing resource. This intermediary allocates virtual environments to customer sessions, manages their lifecycle, and ensures proper isolation, thereby enabling secure multi-tenant operation without requiring dedicated hardware for each customer.
2Reliability
If dedicated hardware is allocated to each customer to ensure data security, then data security is improved, but resource utilization and scalability deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple customer sessions onto a single shared computing resource by using virtualization to create isolated virtual environments for each customer. This combining approach achieves the security of dedicated hardware while utilizing shared physical resources, thereby improving resource utilization and scalability compared to true dedicated hardware allocation.
Solution Approach 2:
The shared computing resource is designed to be universal and multi-functional, capable of serving multiple different customer sessions sequentially and concurrently through virtualization. This universality allows the same physical hardware to provide secure isolated environments for various customers without requiring dedicated hardware for each, thus improving resource utilization while maintaining security.
3Ease of operation
If customer data is stored persistently on shared storage, then data accessibility between sessions is improved, but data exposure and security risks increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses ephemeral virtual environments that are created for each customer session and destroyed when the session ends. This disposable approach ensures that customer data exists only temporarily in memory during the active session, eliminating persistent storage risks while maintaining data accessibility during the session. The virtual environment itself acts as a temporary container that is discarded after use.
Data Source
AI summary
A pool of virtual environments, such as virtual machine instances and containers, can be maintained by an intermediary service, where the virtual environments can execute a specified application or service. When a request is received from a client for a connection to a resource, the intermediary service can allocate one of the virtual environments for the client and enable the client and virtual environment to communicate as if the virtual environment is executing on dedicated hardware. The virtual environment can be virtually isolated on a host machine, whereby session data for the client is stored locally in memory and then deleted at the end of the session when the virtual environment is destroyed, in order to prevent the data from being accessible between sessions and preventing multiple clients or customers from sharing the same environment over time.