CRII: SaTC: Evolving I/O Protocols for Confidential Computing

尽管云计算对数据安全和隐私构成了新的威胁，但由于其可扩展性和成本节约，它已迅速成为部署在线服务的标准方法。由于云服务提供商（CSP）操作硬件和特权软件，恶意的CSP可以随时访问或更改客户的敏感数据，而CSP软件中的漏洞可以让攻击者做同样的事情。为了提高云安全性，主要芯片设计人员最近增加了对机密计算的支持：在安全的硬件enclave中运行工作负载，其中工作负载的内存被加密，从而保护它不受CSP的影响。这一建议为将机密计算扩展到分布式服务（一种越来越普遍的云计算类型）提供了知识。拟议的研究将为组织开发创新的开源系统软件，在不牺牲其隐私或用户隐私的情况下使用基本的云服务。为了培养下一代网络安全从业者，计划的活动包括指导本科生和面向K-12学生的拓展项目。该提案的核心研究问题是：(1)当系统中的一些节点是飞地时，协议必须如何处理身份验证和授权，以及(2)协议如何安全地包含可信和不可信节点的混合，包括攻击者破坏的节点。该提案针对两个重要的现有协议：传输层安全（TLS）和云对象存储研究了这些问题。具体来说，该提案寻求扩展TLS，以允许飞地使用一组身份（例如其启动度量、运行时度量和域名）对自己进行身份验证，并探索使用联合签名方案以使这种身份验证高效而优雅。在支持复杂的端点身份验证之后，该提案开发了TLS的扩展，用于授权enclaves如何共享数据，从而通过不同参与方的分布式系统强制信息流。最后，该提案探讨了存储协议扩展，通过使用有效的、包辅助的、密钥旋转和数据重新加密来减轻共享、加密云对象存储中密钥泄露的损害。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Cloud computing has quickly become a standard approach for deploying online services due to its scalability and cost savings, despite the new threats it poses for data security and privacy. As the cloud service provider (CSP) operates the hardware and privileged software, a malicious CSP can readily access or alter a customer’s sensitive data, while a bug in the CSP’s software can allow an attacker to do the same. To improve cloud security, the major chip designers recently added support for confidential computing: running a workload in a secure hardware enclave where the workload’s memory is encrypted, thus shielding it from the CSP. This proposal advances the knowledge for extending confidential computing to distributed services, an increasingly common type of cloud computing. The proposed research will develop innovative, open-source systems software for organizations to make use of essential cloud services without sacrificing their privacy or the privacy of their users. To prepare the next generation of cybersecurity practitioners, planned activities include the mentoring undergraduates and outreach programs for K-12 students.The proposal’s central research questions are: (1) how must protocols handle authentication and authorization when some nodes in the system are enclaves, and (2) how can protocols safely encompass a mix of trusted and untrusted nodes, including nodes that an attacker compromised. The proposal investigates these questions for two important existing protocols: Transport Layer Security (TLS) and cloud object storage. Specifically, the proposal seeks to extend TLS to allow an enclave to authenticate itself using a set of identities (such as its launch measurement, runtime measurement, and domain name), and explores the use of joint signature schemes to make such authentication efficient and elegant. Having support for complex endpoint authentication, the proposal then develops extensions to TLS for authorizing how enclaves may share data, thus enforcing the flow of information through a distributed system of diverse parties. Finally, the proposal explores storage protocol extensions that mitigate the damage of key compromise in a shared, encrypted cloud object store by using efficient, enclave-assisted, key rotation and data re-encryption.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.