Layering negotiations for flexible attestation

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been paid to research on distributed coalitions that establish trust among the members of groups of computing components in distributed environments. The Trusted Virtual Domains (TVD) that our research division is proposing is a new model of a distributed coalition for establishing multiple trusted coalitions of components on nodes in distributed heterogeneous environments. In a large-scale distributed computing environment where many kinds of components exist and there might be difficult situations to agree common attestation methods among all components beforehand, it is necessary to provide each component with flexible attestation according to its usage scenario for increasing the number of components that can participate in TVD.In this paper, we propose a layering negotiation approach. It divides an attestation process into a global attestation phase that verifies that a TVD is fundamentally secure and supporting essential trusted primitives and a local attestation phase that verifies the integrity of a specific component involved in a usage scenario. And, a combination of attestation methods is decided as a result of negotiation between the components for each kind of attestation at each phase. With our approach, the attestation corresponding to a usage scenario can be done flexibly based on the minimal required attestation needed in the TVD, so the component developers can concentrate on the implementation of the higher-level functions. Copyright 2006 ACM.