Root-Of-Trust for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Pipeline in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has gained significant use over the last decade due to its several benefits, including cost savings associated with setup, deployments, delivery, physical resource sharing across virtual machines, and availability of on-demand cloud services. However, in addition to usual threats in almost every computing environment, cloud computing has also introduced a set of new threats as consumers share physical resources due to the physical co-location paradigm. Furthermore, since there are a growing number of attacks directed at cloud environments (including dictionary attacks, replay code attacks, denial of service attacks, rootkit attacks, code injection attacks, etc.), customers require additional assurances before adopting cloud services. Moreover, the continuous integration and continuous deployment of the code fragments have made cloud services more prone to security breaches. In this study, the model based on the root of trust for continuous integration and continuous deployment is proposed, instead of only relying on a single sign-on authentication method that typically uses only id and password. The underlying study opted hardware security module by utilizing the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is commonly available as a cryptoprocessor on the motherboards of the personal computers and data center servers. The preliminary proof of concept demonstrated that the TPM features can be utilized through RESTful services to establish the root of trust for continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline and can additionally be integrated as a secure microservice feature in the cloud computing environment.