PPoSS: Planning: High-Performance Certified Trust for Global-Scale Applications

在过去的十年中，以各种规模的数据中心的形式出现了全球规模的分布式计算资源的公共基础设施。如今，这一全球基础设施的用户必须根据非正式文本合同信任基础设施供应商。这种信任模式为用户利益提供了有限的法律保护，并已成为更多服务迁移到公共基础设施中的关键障碍，阻碍了创新和竞争。该项目的主要创新之处在于为大规模分布式系统构建高性能、经过认证的执行环境(CAES)。在此过程中，该项目探索、改进和发现了扩展认证信任的设计原则-具体地说，向上扩展以包括整个软件堆栈，向外扩展以包括全球分布的资源。该项目的主要影响是支持和促进对全球公共基础设施的可靠、高效和成本效益的使用，增强全球市场的应用程序和服务的能力。具体地说，它将降低初创企业进入全球市场的门槛，从而促进竞争和创新，并使信息技术更容易获得。它旨在深刻改变许多传统上严重依赖专有IT基础设施的行业，例如移动网络。该项目做出了三项相关的科学贡献。首先，它为构建用于运行全球规模的应用程序的分布式CEE飞地贡献了新技术。CEE通过正式验证扩展了远程证明(如在可信执行环境(TES)中)，因此信任链不仅可以用来确定Enclave二进制文件的真实性，还可以用来确定可信性属性。其次，它提供硬件和软件支持，以加速实现隔离、完整性和机密性的底层机制。这些主题从支持更好的隔离到CPU和TEE，但也包括新兴硬件加速器的快速机制。最后，研究小组探索了使用基于软件定义的网络的功能分解，将可证明可信的执行环境扩展到新兴的分散式数据中心设计。从他们的研究中收集的见解指导为值得信赖的分散式云设计开发新的算法驱动、数据结构驱动和硬件驱动的解决方案。在规划阶段，调查人员正在开发一个原型试验台，以评估使用云规模的分布式CEE构建高性能、可信赖的全球规模移动网络的可行性。他们正在编制一份挑战清单，这些挑战将成为全面、大型提案的中心研究议程。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A global-scale public infrastructure of distributed computing resources, in the form of data centers of various scales, has emerged in the past decade. Today, a user of this global infrastructure must trust the infrastructure vendors based on their informal textual contracts. This trust model provides limited legal protection of user interests and has become a key barrier for more services to migrate into the public infrastructure, stymieing innovation and competition. This project's key novelty is to build highly performant, certified execution environments (CEEs) for large-scale distributed systems. In doing so, the project explores, refines, and discovers design principles for scaling certified trust --- specifically, scaling up to include the entire software stack, and scaling out to include globally distributed resources. The project's main impact is to enable and promote trustworthy, performant, cost-effective uses of the public global infrastructure, empowering applications and services for a global market. Specifically it will lower the barrier of entrance for startups to enter a global market and as a result, foster competition and innovation, and make information technologies more accessible. It is intended to profoundly change many industries that traditionally heavily rely on proprietary IT infrastructures, e.g., mobile networks. The project makes three related scientific contributions. First, it contributes new technologies for building distributed CEE enclaves for running global-scale applications. CEEs extend remote attestation (as in trusted execution environments (TEEs)) with formal verification so the chain of trust can be used to establish not only the authenticity of enclave binaries but also the trustworthiness properties. Second, it provides hardware and software support to accelerate the underlying mechanisms for isolation, integrity, and confidentiality. These themes range from support for better isolation to CPUs and TEEs, but also include fast mechanisms for emerging hardware accelerators. Finally, the team of researchers explores the extension of certifiably trustworthy execution environments to emerging disaggregated datacenter designs using a software-defined-network-based decomposition of functionalities. The insights gleaned from their study guide the development of new algorithm-driven, data structure-driven, and hardware-driven solutions for the trustworthy disaggregated cloud design. During the Planning stage, the investigators are developing a prototype testbed to evaluate the feasibility of building a high-performance trustworthy global-scale mobile network using cloud-scale disaggregated CEEs. They are compiling a list of challenges which become the central research agenda for a full-scale, large proposal.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.