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The federal government has an expressed interest in moving data and services to third party service providers in order to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and potential cost savings. This approach is called cloud computing. The thesis for this research is that efficient techniques exist to support the secure use of public cloud computing resources by a large, federated enterprise. The primary contributions of this research are the novel cryptographic system MA-AHASBE (Multi-Authority Anonymous Hierarchical Attribute-Set Based Encryption), and the techniques used to incorporate MA-AHASBE in a real world application. Performance results indicate that while there is a cost associated with enforcing the suggested security model, the cost is not unreasonable and the benefits in security can be significant. The contributions of this research give the DoD additional tools for supporting the mission while taking advantage of the cost efficient public cloud computing resources that are becoming widely available.

Virtualization is a technique used to model and simulate the cyber domain, as well as train and educate. Different types of virtualization techniques exist that each support a unique set of benefits and requirements. This research proposes a novel design that incorporates host and network virtualization concepts for a cyber warfare training platform. At the host level, hybrid virtualization combines full and operating system virtualization techniques in order to leverage the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of each individual technique. Network virtualization allows virtual machines to connect in flexible topologies, but it also incurs additional processing overhead. Quantitative analysis falls into two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments evaluates traditional virtualization techniques against the hybrid approach. Results indicate that in some cases, performance of hybrid virtualization exceeds that of full virtualization alone while still providing an identical feature set. The second set of experiments examines the amount of overhead involved with network virtualization with respect to bandwidth and latency. Results indicate that performance over a local area network incurs two to four times the performance cost compared to physical connections. The benefit of this additional overhead is an increased flexibility in defining network topologies at the software level independent of the underlying physical topology.