Real‑Time Zero‑Trust Monitoring for Cloud Security and Integrity in Trusted Public Clouds

Abstract

Due to its scalability, cost efficiency, and high quality storage and computational abilities, cloud computing is increasingly being adopted in critical spheres such as healthcare, finance, and social media. Outsourcing of data and processing to third-party cloud architectures expose data integrity and privacy risks including data alteration and unauthorized access by both external and internal users. To help prevent these threats, a Zero-Trust runtime architecture is adopted to provide continuous monitoring and validation of the status of the client machine. TPC system ensures integrity by integrating a monitoring module at the kernel level, a trust agent, a Software Trusted Platform Module (SWTPM), and a verification cluster. It validates the client-side changes by using cryptographic hash and real-time verification systems to detect the anomalies and unauthorized changes. The system supports dynamic verification rules by using an Include and Exclude strategy to increase the efficiency of the computation. An activity monitoring addon is added to log-based, which monitors the patterns of the activity so that it can prevent the entry of unauthorized users. The framework is deployed to local environment to simulate the actions of cloud and tested with simulated virtual machines which is efficient in monitoring of state of machine and real time notification of security breach.