Biblio

Several years ago, virtualization technologies, hypervisors were rediscovered, today virtualization is used in a variety of applications. Network operators have discovered the cost-effectiveness, flexibility,, scalability of virtualizing network functions (NFV). However, in light of current events, security breaches related to platform software manipulation the use of Trusted Computing technologies has become not only more popular but increasingly viewed as mandatory for adequate system protection. While Trusted Computing hardware for physical platforms is currently available, widely used, analogous support for virtualized environments, virtualized platforms is rare, not suitable for larger scale virtualization scenarios. Current remote, deep attestation protocols for virtual machines can support a limited amount of virtual machines before the inefficient use of the TPM device becomes a crucial bottle neck. We propose a scalable remote attestation scheme suitable for private cloud, NFV use cases supporting large amounts of VM attestations by efficient use of the physical TPM device.

Establishing trust relationships between network participants by having them prove their operating system's integrity via a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides interesting approaches for securing local networks at a higher level. In the introduced approach on OSI layer 2, attacks carried out by already authenticated and participating nodes (insider threats) can be detected and prevented. Forbidden activities and manipulations in hard- and software, such as executing unknown binaries, loading additional kernel modules or even inserting unauthorized USB devices, are detected and result in an autonomous reaction of each network participant. The provided trust establishment and authentication protocol operates independently from upper protocol layers and is optimized for resource constrained machines. Well known concepts of backbone architectures can maintain the chain of trust between different kinds of network types. Each endpoint, forwarding and processing unit monitors the internal network independently and reports misbehaviours autonomously to a central instance in or outside of the trusted network.