PPoSS: Planning: High-Performance Certified Trust for Global-Scale Applications

A global-scale public infrastructure of distributed computing resources, in the form of data centers of various scales, has emerged in the past decade. Today, a user of this global infrastructure must trust the infrastructure vendors based on their informal textual contracts. This trust model provides limited legal protection of user interests and has become a key barrier for more services to migrate into the public infrastructure, stymieing innovation and competition.

This project's key novelty is to build highly performant, certified execution environments (CEEs) for large-scale distributed systems. In doing so, the project explores, refines, and discovers design principles for scaling certified trust --- specifically, scaling up to include the entire software stack, and scaling out to include globally distributed resources.

The project's main impact is to enable and promote trustworthy, performant, cost-effective uses of the public global infrastructure, empowering applications and services for a global market. Specifically it will lower the barrier of entrance for startups to enter a global market and as a result, foster competition and innovation, and make information technologies more accessible.

It is intended to profoundly change many industries that traditionally heavily rely on proprietary IT infrastructures, e.g., mobile networks.

The project makes three related scientific contributions. First, it contributes new technologies for building distributed CEE enclaves for running global-scale applications. CEEs extend remote attestation (as in trusted execution environments (TEEs)) with formal verification so the chain of trust can be used to establish not only the authenticity of enclave binaries but also the trustworthiness properties.

Second, it provides hardware and software support to accelerate the underlying mechanisms for isolation, integrity, and confidentiality. These themes range from support for better isolation to CPUs and TEEs, but also include fast mechanisms for emerging hardware accelerators. Finally, the team of researchers explores the extension of certifiably trustworthy execution environments to emerging disaggregated datacenter designs using a software-defined-network-based decomposition of functionalities.

The insights gleaned from their study guide the development of new algorithm-driven, data structure-driven, and hardware-driven solutions for the trustworthy disaggregated cloud design. During the Planning stage, the investigators are developing a prototype testbed to evaluate the feasibility of building a high-performance trustworthy global-scale mobile network using cloud-scale disaggregated CEEs.

They are compiling a list of challenges which become the central research agenda for a full-scale, large proposal.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.