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Trusted attestation is the main obstruction preventing large-scale promotion of cloud computing. How to extend a trusted relationship from a single physical node to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform is a problem that must be solved. The IaaS platform provides the Virtual Machine (VM), and the Trusted VM, equipped with a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), is the foundation of the trusted IaaS platform. We propose a multi-dimensional trusted attestation architecture that can collect and verify trusted attestation information from the computing nodes, and manage the information centrally on a cloud management platform. The architecture verifies the IaaS’s trusted attestation by apprising the VM, Hypervisor, and host Operating System’s (OS) trusted status. The theory and the technology roadmap were introduced, and the key technologies were analyzed. The key technologies include dynamic measurement of the Hypervisor at the process level, the protection of vTPM instances, the reinforcement of Hypervisor security, and the verification of the IaaS trusted attestation. A prototype was deployed to verify the feasibility of the system. The advantages of the prototype system were compared with the Open CIT (Intel Cloud attestation solution). A performance analysis experiment was performed on computing nodes and the results show that the performance loss is within an acceptable range.


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Trusted Attestation Architecture on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Show Author's information Xin JinXingshu Chen( )Cheng ZhaoDandan Zhao
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.

Abstract

Trusted attestation is the main obstruction preventing large-scale promotion of cloud computing. How to extend a trusted relationship from a single physical node to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform is a problem that must be solved. The IaaS platform provides the Virtual Machine (VM), and the Trusted VM, equipped with a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), is the foundation of the trusted IaaS platform. We propose a multi-dimensional trusted attestation architecture that can collect and verify trusted attestation information from the computing nodes, and manage the information centrally on a cloud management platform. The architecture verifies the IaaS’s trusted attestation by apprising the VM, Hypervisor, and host Operating System’s (OS) trusted status. The theory and the technology roadmap were introduced, and the key technologies were analyzed. The key technologies include dynamic measurement of the Hypervisor at the process level, the protection of vTPM instances, the reinforcement of Hypervisor security, and the verification of the IaaS trusted attestation. A prototype was deployed to verify the feasibility of the system. The advantages of the prototype system were compared with the Open CIT (Intel Cloud attestation solution). A performance analysis experiment was performed on computing nodes and the results show that the performance loss is within an acceptable range.

Keywords: dynamic measurement, trusted cloud, vTPM, trusted attestation

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Publication history
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Publication history

Received: 01 October 2016
Accepted: 21 October 2016
Published: 11 September 2017
Issue date: October 2017

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© The author(s) 2017

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61272447).

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