712 research outputs found
TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art
There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms
RADIS: Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services
Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted
party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trustworthiness of a potentially untrusted
device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing
remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified
software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an interoperable IoT
system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an
additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine
operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the
latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of
Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trustworthiness of
distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of
the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved
in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow
attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected
operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our
experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity
status of a distributed IoT service.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 2 table
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Trusted Launch of Generic Virtual Machine Images in Public IaaS Environments
Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are emerging and promising technologies, however their faster-pased adoption is hampered by data security concerns. In the same time, Trusted Computing (TC) is experiencing a revived interest as a security mechanism for IaaS. We address the lack of an implementable mechanism to ensure the launch of a virtual machine (VM) instance on a trusted remote host. Relying on Trusted Platform Modules operations such as binding and sealing to provide integrity guarantees for clients that require a trusted VM launch, we have designed a trusted launch protocol for generic VM images in public IaaS environments. We also present a proof-of-concept implemen-
tation of the protocol based on OpenStack, an open-source IaaS platform. The results provide a basis for use of TC mechanisms within IaaS platforms and pave the way for a wider applicability of TC to IaaS security
S-FaaS: Trustworthy and Accountable Function-as-a-Service using Intel SGX
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a recent and already very popular paradigm in
cloud computing. The function provider need only specify the function to be
run, usually in a high-level language like JavaScript, and the service provider
orchestrates all the necessary infrastructure and software stacks. The function
provider is only billed for the actual computational resources used by the
function invocation. Compared to previous cloud paradigms, FaaS requires
significantly more fine-grained resource measurement mechanisms, e.g. to
measure compute time and memory usage of a single function invocation with
sub-second accuracy. Thanks to the short duration and stateless nature of
functions, and the availability of multiple open-source frameworks, FaaS
enables non-traditional service providers e.g. individuals or data centers with
spare capacity. However, this exacerbates the challenge of ensuring that
resource consumption is measured accurately and reported reliably. It also
raises the issues of ensuring computation is done correctly and minimizing the
amount of information leaked to service providers.
To address these challenges, we introduce S-FaaS, the first architecture and
implementation of FaaS to provide strong security and accountability guarantees
backed by Intel SGX. To match the dynamic event-driven nature of FaaS, our
design introduces a new key distribution enclave and a novel transitive
attestation protocol. A core contribution of S-FaaS is our set of resource
measurement mechanisms that securely measure compute time inside an enclave,
and actual memory allocations. We have integrated S-FaaS into the popular
OpenWhisk FaaS framework. We evaluate the security of our architecture, the
accuracy of our resource measurement mechanisms, and the performance of our
implementation, showing that our resource measurement mechanisms add less than
6.3% latency on standardized benchmarks
Integrity Verification of Distributed Nodes in Critical Infrastructures
The accuracy and reliability of time synchronization and distribution are essential requirements for many critical infrastructures, including telecommunication networks, where 5G technologies place increasingly stringent conditions in terms of maintaining highly accurate time. A lack of synchronization between the clocks causes a malfunction of the 5G network, preventing it from providing a high quality of service; this makes the time distribution network a very viable target for attacks. Various solutions have been analyzed to mitigate attacks on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio-frequency spectrum and the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) used for time distribution over the network. This paper highlights the significance of monitoring the integrity of the software and configurations of the infrastructural nodes of a time distribution network. Moreover, this work proposes an attestation scheme, based on the Trusted Computing principles, capable of detecting both software violations on the nodes and hardware attacks aimed at tampering with the configuration of the GNSS receivers. The proposed solution has been implemented and validated on a testbed representing a typical synchronization distribution network. The results, simulating various types of adversaries, emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a wide range of typical attacks and the certain limitations that need to be addressed to enhance the security of the current GNSS receivers
Towards a Trustworthy Thin Terminal for Securing Enterprise Networks
Organizations have many employees that lack the technical knowledge to securely operate their machines. These users may open malicious email attachments/links or install unverified software such as P2P programs. These actions introduce significant risk to an organization\u27s network since they allow attackers to exploit the trust and access given to a client machine. However, system administrators currently lack the control of client machines needed to prevent these security risks. A possible solution to address this issue lies in attestation. With respect to computer science, attestation is the ability of a machine to prove its current state. This capability can be used by client machines to remotely attest to their state, which can be used by other machines in the network when making trust decisions. Previous research in this area has focused on the use of a static root of trust (RoT), requiring the use of a chain of trust over the entire software stack. We would argue this approach is limited in feasibility, because it requires an understanding and evaluation of the all the previous states of a machine. With the use of late launch, a dynamic root of trust introduced in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) v1.2 specification, the required chain of trust is drastically shortened, minimizing the previous states of a machine that must be evaluated. This reduced chain of trust may allow a dynamic RoT to address the limitations of a static RoT. We are implementing a client terminal service that utilizes late launch to attest to its execution. Further, the minimal functional requirements of the service facilitate strong software verification. The goal in designing this service is not to increase the security of the network, but rather to push the functionality, and therefore the security risks and responsibilities, of client machines to the network€™s servers. In doing so, we create a platform that can more easily be administered by those individuals best equipped to do so with the expectation that this will lead to better security practices. Through the use of late launch and remote attestation in our terminal service, the system administrators have a strong guarantee the clients connecting to their system are secure and can therefore focus their efforts on securing the server architecture. This effectively addresses our motivating problem as it forces user actions to occur under the control of system administrators
Secure migration of WebAssembly-based mobile agents between secure enclaves
Cryptography and security protocols are today commonly used to protect data at-rest and in-transit. In contrast, protecting data in-use has seen only limited adoption. Secure data transfer methods employed today rarely provide guarantees regarding the trustworthiness of the software and hardware at the communication endpoints.
The field of study that addresses these issues is called Trusted or Confidential Computing and relies on the use of hardware-based techniques. These techniques aim to isolate critical data and its processing from the rest of the system. More specifically, it investigates the use of hardware isolated Secure Execution Environments (SEEs) where applications cannot be tampered with during operation. Over the past few decades, several implementations of SEEs have been introduced, each based on a different hardware architecture. However, lately, the trend is to move towards architecture-independent SEEs.
As part of this, Huawei research project is developing a secure enclave framework that enables secure execution and migration of applications (mobile agents), regardless of the underlying architecture. This thesis contributes to the development of the framework by participating in the design and implementation of a secure migration scheme for the mobile agents. The goal is a scheme wherein it is possible to transfer the mobile agent without compromising the security guarantees provided by SEEs. Further, the thesis also provides performance measurements of the migration scheme implemented in a proof of concept of the framework
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