Towards a virtual trusted platform

Abstract: The advances and adoption of Trusted Computing and hardware assisted virtualisation technologies in standard PC platforms promise new approaches in building a robust virtualisation platform for security sensitive software modules. The amalgam of these technologies allows an attractive off-the-shelf environment, capable of supporting security levels potentially higher than commonly deployed today. This article proposes a practical approach of combining technology elements available today to create such a platform using available components. The design supports operating high-security and low-security compartments side by side. The high security compartment is able to use the functionality of the Trusted Platform Module. The low security compartment is isolated through hardware-assisted virtualisation. The platform boots via Intel Trusted Execution Technology to resist manipulation. We discuss the building blocks of the architecture and present a number of open research challenges

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

CoVE: Towards Confidential Computing on RISC-V Platforms

Multi-tenant computing platforms are typically comprised of several software and hardware components including platform firmware, host operating system kernel, virtualization monitor, and the actual tenant payloads that run on them (typically in a virtual machine, container, or application). This model is well established in large scale commercial deployment, but the downside is that all platform components and operators are in the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) of the tenant. This aspect is ill-suited for privacy-oriented workloads that aim to minimize the TCB footprint. Confidential computing presents a good stepping-stone towards providing a quantifiable TCB for computing. Confidential computing [1] requires the use of a HW-attested Trusted Execution Environments for data-in-use protection. The RISC-V architecture presents a strong foundation for meeting the requirements for Confidential Computing and other security paradigms in a clean slate manner. This paper describes a reference architecture and discusses ISA, non-ISA and system-on-chip (SoC) requirements for confidential computing on RISC-V Platforms. It discusses proposed ISA and non-ISA Extension for Confidential Virtual Machine for RISC-V platforms, referred to as CoVE

Trusted Launch of Virtual Machine Instances in Public IaaS Environments

Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are emerging and promising technologies, however their adoption is hampered by data security concerns. At the same time, Trusted Computing (TC) is experiencing an increasing interest as a security mechanism for IaaS. In this paper we present a protocol to ensure the launch of a virtual machine (VM) instance on a trusted remote compute host. Relying on Trusted Platform Module 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 VM instances in public IaaS environments. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of the protocol based on OpenStack, an open-source IaaS platform. The results provide a basis for the use of TC mechanisms within IaaS platforms and pave the way for a wider applicability of TC to IaaS security

Deploying Virtual Machines on Shared Platforms

In this report, we describe mechanisms for secure deployment of virtual machines on shared platforms looking into a telecommunication cloud use case, which is also presented in this report. The architecture we present focuses on the security requirements of the major stakeholders’ part of the scenario we present. This report comprehensively covers all major security aspects including different security mechanisms and protocols, leveraging existing standards and state-of-the art wherever applicable. In particular, our architecture uses TCG technologies for trust establishment in the deployment of operator virtual machines on shared resource platforms. We also propose a novel procedure for securely launching and cryptographically binding a virtual machine to a target platform thereby protecting the operator virtual machine and its related credentials

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

Trusted Launch of Virtual Machine Instances in Public IaaS Environments

Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are emerging and promising technologies, however their adoption is hampered by data security concerns. At the same time, Trusted Computing (TC) is experiencing an increasing interest as a security mechanism for IaaS. In this paper we present a protocol to ensure the launch of a virtual machine (VM) instance on a trusted remote compute host. Relying on Trusted Platform Module 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 VM instances in public IaaS environments. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of the protocol based on OpenStack, an open-source IaaS platform. The results provide a basis for the use of TC mechanisms within IaaS platforms and pave the way for a wider applicability of TC to IaaS security

SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX

Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices. This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX, allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this, SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1