sovereign cloud design

This study addresses the limitations of traditional cloud sovereignty, which relies on geographic location and struggles to manage governance challenges arising from geopolitical tensions, legal uncertainties, and expanding service boundaries. The authors propose Sovereign 2.0, a novel model that redefines sovereignty as evidence-based control rather than physical infrastructure placement. This framework establishes a three-layer control structure—governance, operational, and technical—integrating post-quantum-ready cryptographic mechanisms such as TLS and key escrow. It enables enforceable service governance across federated environments through governance authority, privileged access management, data lifecycle controls, observability, and incident response. The model introduces a pioneering three-tier risk assurance system covering both steady-state and crisis scenarios, delivering verifiable sovereignty throughout the cloud service lifecycle and significantly enhancing system resilience and recoverability, with profound implications for cloud architecture design, procurement strategies, and security governance.

This work addresses the absence of design methodologies that treat digital sovereignty as a core architectural attribute, a gap that hinders the construction of compliant, auditable, and controlled systems in environments dominated by generative AI and cloud infrastructure. For the first time, digital sovereignty is formally modeled as a first-class quality attribute in software architecture. The paper proposes a reference architecture that integrates self-sovereign identity (SSI), blockchain-based trust mechanisms, sovereign data governance, and generative AI deployment under explicit architectural constraints. The resulting architecture is jurisdiction-aware, supports system auditability and evolvability, elucidates the dual role of generative AI as both an enabler of compliance and a source of risk, and establishes a systematic pathway for aligning regulatory intent with system design.

This paper challenges the widely held assumption that hosting data centers locally guarantees digital sovereignty, examining how the nationality of data center operators affects their subjection to foreign legal jurisdiction. Method: We construct a multidimensional dataset comprising 775 non-U.S. data centers—spanning over 20 variables and 1,000 cited sources—employing investment-value-weighted statistical analysis, public information mining, and qualitative textual analysis. Contribution/Results: Weighted by investment volume, 48% of non-U.S. data centers are operated by U.S.-based firms, revealing persistent dependence of global compute infrastructure on American entities. The paper introduces “data operator” as a pivotal lever in international AI governance, demonstrating that operational control—not merely physical location—fundamentally shapes digital sovereignty. To foster transparency and reproducibility, we publicly release the dataset to support future empirical research on transnational data infrastructure governance.

Existing access control mechanisms fail to enforce authenticated authorization at the moment of change, enabling non-deterministic agents to perform unauthorized operations in production environments. This work proposes the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary that validates certificates issued by a Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB) to ensure changes strictly conform to certified execution contracts and derive scoped execution identities for invoking infrastructure APIs. SEB is the first system to decouple proposal, admission, and execution into distinct phases, transforming authorization into short-lived, revocable, and auditable runtime capabilities. It integrates certificate binding, policy and validity verification, state drift detection, and tamper-resistant deployment to prevent bypassing. Evaluations on AWS and Kubernetes demonstrate that SEB enforces least-privilege access with low latency overhead, supports rapid revocation, enables real-time drift detection, and provides strong security guarantees.

To address challenges in highly regulated environments—including cross-cloud governance complexity, high operational overhead, and prolonged configuration cycles for cloud-native applications (CNAs)—this paper proposes a “batteries-included,” out-of-the-box reference architecture. The architecture tightly integrates policy-as-code, declarative APIs, service mesh, and a compliance metamodel to automatically embed governance capabilities across the application lifecycle while decoupling them from business logic. It introduces the first unified abstraction mechanism for cross-cloud governance elements, enabling lightweight deployment alongside elastic scalability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates substantial reduction in governance configuration time and validates strong adaptability in finance and government sectors—two representative highly compliant domains. The architecture supports agile delivery and automated compliance auditing, thereby filling a critical academic gap in generic CNA governance frameworks.

This study addresses the longstanding lack of a clear and actionable definition of digital sovereignty within software architecture. It systematically models digital sovereignty as a software quality attribute for the first time, integrating cloud computing contexts with the European Union’s policy framework. The work proposes a scenario-based analysis approach to establish its measurability, core characteristics, and trade-off mechanisms with other quality attributes. By synthesizing techniques from quality attribute modeling, scenario analysis, and policy mapping, this research operationalizes digital sovereignty in engineering practice, enabling its validation, evaluation, and informed decision-making during architectural design. In doing so, it bridges the gap between high-level policy concepts and concrete system implementation.

论文提出一种权威分解框架，通过行动相关方法确定哪些信任域联合体能导致受保护执行，解决高风险自动化系统中控制分布问题。

This study addresses the inefficiencies in SaaS onboarding within regulated enterprises, where siloed security and compliance controls—spanning third-party risk management, cybersecurity, identity and access management, and disaster recovery—often result in process delays, redundant assessments, and ambiguous accountability. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes an end-to-end, control-driven SaaS onboarding framework that integrates multi-domain controls into a unified lifecycle model encompassing requirement intake, architectural validation, identity design, resilience assessment, and post-deployment governance. By leveraging cross-domain control mapping, phased process modeling, and governance checklists, the framework codifies key design patterns such as secure connectivity, federated identity, least-privilege access, and shared-responsibility disaster recovery. Empirical implementation demonstrates that the approach significantly reduces onboarding friction, enhances audit traceability, and strengthens both the security posture and operational resilience of SaaS platforms.

研究通过结合正式验证、监控和需求工程等方法，解决了公共数据交换基础设施中的数据使用控制问题，以满足隐私设计要求。

This work addresses the challenge of efficiently implementing zero-trust-compliant, multi-tenant secure network connectivity in computationally or entropy-constrained environments. The authors propose and implement a cloud-native VPN-as-a-Service (VPNaaS) solution that, for the first time, integrates zero-trust network isolation capabilities with customizable cryptographic algorithms—supporting either RSA or elliptic curve cryptography. The system enables on-demand, dynamic provisioning of tenant-level isolated secure tunnels and seamlessly interoperates with mainstream identity and access management (IAM) platforms. By adhering to the principle of least privilege and enforcing strict multi-tenancy isolation, the proposed approach significantly enhances both deployment efficiency and security in resource-constrained settings.