Trusted Heterogeneous Disaggregated Architectures

Abstract

The rising performance demands and increasing heterogeneity in cloud data centers lead to a paradigm shift in the cloud infrastructure, from monolithic servers to a disaggregated architecture. In a multi-tenant cloud, users should be able to leverage trusted computing to protect their applications from untrusted parties. While Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a well-known technique to realize trusted computing on monolithic servers, we cannot adopt existing TEE technologies to the disaggregated architecture due to their distributed nature and heterogeneity of devices. To address these challenges, we propose trusted heterogeneous disaggregated architectures, which allows cloud users to construct virtual TEEs (vTEEs): TEE-based, secure, isolated environments assembled with any combination of disaggregated components.