Virtual Container Attestation

Virtual Container Attestation:
Customized trusted containers for on-demand
Computing



Abstract

In today's computing environment, data is moving to central locations and most computers are merely used to access the data. Today is the era of cloud computing and distributed computing, where users have control over neither data nor computation. As this trend continues there is an increasing frequency of mutually distrustful parties being forced to interact and share resources with each other in potentially dangerous situations. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a means of creating trust between two entities, or at the very least providing some means of determining the trust level of a given machine. Current approaches to the trust problem focus on various forms of isolation and attestation, but most have high overheads or are overly rigid in their requirements to users. This method proposes and implements an alternative solution which provides flexible, on-demand containers for un-trusted applications, and enforcement of requested security properties. Together these provide assurance to the remote parties that the machines behave as required or are quickly shut down.