Multi-Cloud TEE Attestation Proxy for Cross-Cloud Trust
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing cloud computing environments face security challenges in establishing trust among different clouds due to disparities in Confidential Computing (CC) abstractions, lacking a uniform attestation abstraction layer for managing per-cloud per-CC resources, which hinders secure access and interaction across multiple clouds.
Innovation Solution
A distributed attestation proxy server (DAPS) facilitates a common and consistent approach for clients to access cloud assets by performing resource discovery, policy enforcement, and challenge-and-response verification, ensuring secure communication and trust establishment across disparate cloud environments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If virtualization is utilized for cost reduction and minimizing hardware dependency in cloud environments, then cost efficiency and hardware flexibility are improved, but trust in the privileged hypervisor becomes necessary and security complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a remote attestation service as an intermediary between the client and the cloud hypervisor. This service provides verifiable evidence of the authenticity of the underlying hardware and current execution state, allowing clients to confirm secure execution without directly trusting the privileged hypervisor. The attestation service acts as a mediator that bridges the trust gap created by virtualization.
2Reliability
If cloud providers offer various CC abstractions to eliminate the need to trust specific cloud vendors, then vendor neutrality and security are improved, but the abstractions typically differ from client to client in terms of assumptions and approaches, creating complexity
Solution Approach 1:
The patent proposes a universal remote attestation service that provides a common and consistent approach for clients to access cloud assets across different cloud providers. Instead of requiring clients to implement different attestation abstractions for different clouds, the service offers a standardized interface that works across multiple cloud environments, reducing complexity while maintaining vendor neutrality.
3Ease of operation
If a uniform attestation abstraction layer is implemented to manage per-cloud per-CC resources, then ease of operation and consistency are improved, but device complexity and implementation overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The remote attestation service serves as an intermediary that implements the uniform abstraction layer. It handles the complexity of translating between different cloud-specific attestation mechanisms and a common client interface. The service absorbs the implementation overhead and complexity, allowing clients to access cloud resources consistently without directly managing the underlying per-cloud per-CC resource complexities.
Data Source
AI summary
One example method includes receiving, by a distributed attestation proxy server (DAPS) from a client, an attestation request, establishing, by the DAPS, a secure communication channel with the client, performing, by the DAPS, a resource discovery process to identify a resource that meets a requirement of the client, facilitating, by the DAPS, an attestation exchange between the client and the resource, performing, by the DAPS, a verification and attestation process that comprises generation of an attestation result, transmitting, by the DAPS, the attestation result to the client, and when the attestation result is positive, establishing, by the DAPS, a secure communication channel between the client and the resource.