CT-ISG: Trusted Passages: Managing Distributed Trust to Meet the Needs of Emerging Applications

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract PI: Ahamad; CoPIs: Lee and Schwan Critical applications that range from operational information systems used in government and commercial settings to those that run daily e-commerce web services rely on distributed computing systems to produce, process, and disseminate information in a trustworthy fashion. Attacks on such applications and the underlying infrastructure can severely limit their ability to meet end-user needs. The inherent complexity of applications, technologies, and platforms in today's large scale distributed systems makes it extremely challenging to create services that can continue to behave in a trustworthy manner in the presence of attacks. In this research project, a new approach is proposed to meet the trust needs of applications by integrating modern system virtualization techniques with new methods for runtime trust monitoring and assessment. This approach dynamically creates and maintains an abstraction called a trusted passage that encapsulates processing, storage and communication resources required by an application. Such resources exist across distributed and potentially untrusted execution platforms. Trust controllers, which monitor application execution, determine at runtime when some resources associated with a trusted passages may have become compromised and need to be replaced by others. Trusted passages leverage new capabilities soon to be part of most, if not all, computational and network platforms. Thus, even with an insecure Internet, our goal is to continually assess the distributed computational platforms being used by applications, and based on that information, provide trusted services to critical applications. This research fosters close collaboration among security and systems researchers and strengthens ongoing interactions with multiple industry research partners.