Tgvisor: A Tiny Hypervisor-Based Trusted Geolocation Framework For Mobile Cloud Clients

In cloud computing, geographic location of data is one of major security concerns of cloud users. To resolve this problem, most of previous work has been done on trusted geolocation service in cloud service providers. For example, users are allowed to determine the physical location of their cloud servers and ensured about their requirements of geolocation-based restrictions. However, it is also essential to handle trusted geolocation service at cloud users' devices in mobile cloud computing. As mobile cloud tenants use cloud services everywhere, trusted geolocation of cloud users arises a new security issue. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel trusted geolocation system named TGVisor for cloud user devices. The key mechanism of TGVisor is providing a trusted channel between the geolocation server and the GPS module in each mobile client device. We leverage Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and tiny hypervisor in order to securely perform the attestation of the geolocation of client devices. To prove the practicality of TGVisor, we design and implement a cloud word processor with trusted geolocation service based on Etherpad. We also evaluate the performance of TGVisor in cloud devices and show that it causes only 8.3% overhead in JavaScript benchmark, which indicates the feasibility of TGVisor.