This paper considers mission assurance for critical cloud applications, a set of applications with growing importance to governments and military organizations. Specifically, we consider applications in which assigned tasks or duties are performed in accordance with an intended purpose or plan in order to accomplish an assured mission. Mission-critical cloud computing may possibly involve hybrid (public, private, heterogeneous) clouds and require the realization of "end-to-end" and "cross-layered" security, dependability, and timeliness. We propose the properties and building blocks of a middleware for assured cloud computing that can support critical missions. In this approach, we assume that mission critical cloud computing must be designed with assurance in mind. In particular, the middleware in such systems must include sophisticated monitoring, assessment of policies, and response to manage the configuration and management of dynamic systems-of-systems with both trusted and partially trusted resources (data, sensors, networks, computers, etc.) and services sourced from multiple organizations.

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