Open Stack

Nicolae-

We've been working under the assumption you have trust the IaaS provider (individual nodes might have been compromised somehow but you trust the provider itself).  I think what you are looking at is adding a 3rd party CA which is significantly increasing the complexity of the solution and potentially exposing the IaaS's infrastructure to a 3rd party, probably not desirable to the IaaS provider.

I've added some others to the thread who can chime in with their opinions.

--
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Ph: 303/443-3786

From: Nicolae Paladi [mailto:n.paladi at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 7:42 AM
To: Dugger, Donald D
Cc: openstack
Subject: Re: [Openstack] Plans for Trusted Computing in OpenStack

Hi,

so basically my questions/thoughts about support for TC in OpenStack are based on a
somewhat different attack model where the IaaS is actually not trusted.

That is in contrast with the Trusted Compute Pools, where the scheduler/trusted_filter
is assumed to reject the host as a candidate for running the VM if it does not have a
corresponding "trust value". However, nothing prevents a really evil IaaS deployment
to ignore this trust value and go ahead, launch the VM and return it to the client. So
there's an improvement suggestion focusing on that part.

The model that I have in mind assumes both no trust in the IaaS setup/provider.

So the gist is that:

1. Client could upload a secret encrypted with the public key of the authentication service
(possible to include in the extra_specs)

2. The Attestation Service, after verifying the compute host could bind the secret to the
hosts trusted configuration, so that the host can inject the secret into the VM

With this approach, a malicious IaaS provider can still launch the VM on an untrusted host, but
now he client can verify that the VM has been started on a 'trusted' host.

So the questions around this are --
1. Is the scenario of an untrusted IaaS deployment considered for Trusted Compute Pools?

2. Is there any work ongoing to extend Trusted Compute Polls for storage as well? Or otherwise
put, what about the storage, is the solution to encrypt all data on the compute host prior to
storing it in the object store?

3. Is there any work ongoing on the evaluation side, namely the evaluation of the trust attributes
obtained from the host -- and do Trusted Compute Pools consider a binary value (trusted/untrusted)
or a scale of security profiles?

Cheers,
/Nico.


On 6 November 2012 19:07, Dugger, Donald D <donald.d.dugger at intel.com<mailto:donald.d.dugger at intel.com>> wrote:
Nico-

This is the appropriate place for discussions about Trusted Compute Pools under OpenStack.  Feel free to send out any ideas you have, I know I and others would be very interested in what you have.

--
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Ph: 303/443-3786<tel:303%2F443-3786>

From: openstack-bounces+donald.d.dugger=intel.com at lists.launchpad.net<mailto:intel.com at lists.launchpad.net> [mailto:openstack-bounces+donald.d.dugger<mailto:openstack-bounces%2Bdonald.d.dugger>=intel.com at lists.launchpad.net<mailto:intel.com at lists.launchpad.net>] On Behalf Of Nicolae Paladi
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 8:35 AM
To: openstack
Subject: [Openstack] Plans for Trusted Computing in OpenStack

Hi,

I am involved in a project that aims to use TPM modules to ensure that
the compute nodes run a 'trusted' software stack in a public IaaS deployment.

I've read about trusted computing pools (http://wiki.openstack.org/TrustedComputingPools)
checked out the OpenAttestation project and seen a presentation from the OpenStack
summit (Putting Trust in OpenStack<http://www.openstack.org/summit/san-diego-2012/openstack-summit-sessions/presentation/putting-trust-in-openstack>) in order to get a better understading of where
OpenStack is heading towards wrt TPM support.

Are there any more resources, discussions, mailing lists that I could check out and
where I could potentially bounce ideas?

Cheers,
/Nico.

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