TapCon: Practical Third-Party Attestation for the Cloud

One way to establish trust in a service is to know what code it is running. However, verified code identity is currently not possible for programs launched on a cloud by another party. We propose an approach to integrate support for code attestation--authenticated statements of code identity--into layered cloud platforms and services. To illustrate, this paper describes TapCon, an attesting container manager that provides source-based attestation and network-based authentication for containers on a trusted cloud platform incorporating new features for code attestation. TapCon allows a third party to verify that an attested container is running specific code bound securely to an identified source repository. We also show how to use attested code identity as a basis for access control. This structure enables new use cases such as joint data mining, in which two data owners agree on a safe analytics program that protects the privacy of their inputs, and then ensure that only the designated program can access their data.