Attestation Tokens Validate Secure Enclave Origins
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Solution Overview
Problem
Stolen TLS certificates and service outages due to expired certifications, along with errors during certificate rotations, pose risks for unauthorized access and data unavailability in secure networks, as existing authentication methods fail to validate requestors beyond certificate ownership.
Innovation Solution
Implementing secure authentication using attestation tokens and inviolable quotes within a secure enclave, where a private key is used to generate signed certificates and secure quotes, and an attestation token is generated to validate the requestor's origin, ensuring only trusted sources access sensitive data or services.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If TLS certificates are used to authenticate requestors, then authentication is established through certificate ownership, but stolen certificates lead to unauthorized access risks and cannot validate the true requestor origin
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an attestation token as an intermediary between the requestor and the service. This token is generated by a trusted platform module (TPM) or secure enclave and contains cryptographic proof of the requestor's identity and environment. The attestation token serves as a mediator that validates the requestor's true origin beyond mere certificate ownership, preventing unauthorized access even if certificates are stolen.
Solution Approach 2:
The authentication process is segmented into multiple independent validation layers: (1) TLS certificate validation for basic authentication, (2) attestation token generation by secure hardware, (3) cryptographic signature verification of the attestation token by the service. This segmentation allows each layer to perform its specific validation function, with the attestation token layer providing the additional security needed to prevent certificate theft exploitation.
2Reliability
If TLS certificates are used for authentication, then secure communication is established, but service outages and data unavailability occur due to expired certifications and errors during certificate rotations
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary validation of the attestation token before establishing the secure communication session. The attestation token contains pre-computed cryptographic proofs of the requestor's identity and environment state. By validating this token in advance during the authentication phase, the system ensures that subsequent data access operations will not be interrupted by certificate validation failures or rotation errors, maintaining productivity and data access continuity.
3Reliability
If attestation tokens with inviolable quotes are implemented to validate request origins, then requestor validation is conclusively established, but system complexity increases with additional authentication components
Solution Approach 1:
The trusted platform module (TPM) or secure enclave performs self-service by automatically generating the attestation token containing the inviolable quote based on its internal cryptographic state. This self-service capability eliminates the need for manual configuration or external intervention to create the authentication proof, reducing operational complexity while maintaining high validation accuracy. The secure hardware autonomously manages its own authentication credentials and generates proofs of identity.
Data Source
AI summary
Secure authentication using attestation tokens and inviolable quotes to validate request origins is performed by systems and platforms. An application programming interface (API) service is hosted via secure enclave of a computing platform container. Requests to a resource system for highly confidential/sensitive information persisted in a data storage, or for computational services, are made through the enclave, which is a source from which requests are trusted. An API call is made from the secure enclave to the resource system to establish a secure communication session based on a signed certificate for the secure enclave that is signed using an encrypted memory of the secure enclave. The API call also includes an attestation token used to validate the secure enclave as the source requesting the information or service via the API call. Confidential/sensitive information is provided to the secure enclave if the API call source is validated by the resource system.