Dynamic policy discovery with remote attestation.pdfVIP

Dynamic Policy Discovery with Remote Attestation Extended Abstract Corin Pitcher? and James Riely?? CTI, DePaul University {cpitcher,jriely}@ Abstract. Remote attestation allows programs running on trusted hardware to prove their identity (and that of their environment) to programs on other hosts. Remote attestation can be used to address security concerns if programs agree on the meaning of data in attestations. This paper studies the enforcement of code- identity based access control policies in a hostile distributed environment, using a combination of remote attestation, dynamic types, and typechecking. This en- sures that programs agree on the meaning of data and cannot violate the access control policy, even in the presence of opponent processes. The formal setting is a π-calculus with secure channels, process identity, and remote attestation. Our approach allows executables to be typechecked and deployed independently, without the need for secure initial key and policy distribution beyond the trusted hardware itself. Keywords remote attestation, code-identity based access control, policy establish- ment, key establishment, π-calculus, Next Generation Secure Computing Base. 1 Introduction Processes in a distributed system often rely upon the trustworthiness of processes run- ning on other hosts. The remote attestation mechanism in Microsoft’s Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) [39], in conjunction with trusted hardware specified by the Trusted Computing Group [50, 42], allows processes running on trusted hard- ware to attach evidence of their identity (and the identity of their environment) to data. Other processes can examine this evidence to assess the degree of trust to place in the process that attested to the data. Enforcement of access control policies in hostile distributed environments has been a driving concern in the development of trusted hardware and remote attestation. We formalize these notions in a variant of the π-calculus [40], dubbe