On the Feasibility of Deploying Software Attestation in Cloud Environments

Abstract

We present XSWAT (Xen SoftWare ATtestation), a system that makes use of timing based software attestation to verify the integrity of cloud computing platforms. We believe that ours is the first instance of a system that uses this attestation technique in a cloud environment and results obtained indicate the feasibility of its deployment. An overview of the XSWAT system and the associated threat model, along with a study of cloud environment impacts on performance, is presented. Environmental parameters include types of interconnects between the XSWAT verifier and measurement agent as well as the number of concurrently executing virtual machines on the platform being verified. Conversely, we also study the impact of XSWAT execution using well known system benchmarks and find this to be insignificant, thereby strengthening the case for XSWAT. We also discuss novel XSWAT mechanisms for addressing TOCTOU attacks.