Scalable attestation: A step toward secure and trusted clouds

Abstract

In this work we present Scalable Attestation, a method which combines both secure boot and trusted boot technologies, and extends them up into the host, its programs, and up into the guest's operating system and workloads, to both detect and prevent integrity attacks. Anchored in hardware, this integrity appraisal and attestation protects persistent data (files) from remote attack, even if the attack is root privileged. As an added benefit of a hardware rooted attestation, we gain a simple hardware based geolocation attestation to help enforce regulatory requirements. This design is implemented in multiple cloud test beds based on the QEMU/KVM hypervisor, OpenStack, and OpenAttestation, and is shown to provide significant additional integrity protection at negligible cost.