CRC: Fully General Model of Confidential Remote Computing
This work addresses security challenges in remote computing for digital services, offering a foundational model that consolidates existing research but is incremental in its approach.
The paper tackles the problem of building trustworthy remote computing systems by proposing a novel Confidential Remote Computing (CRC) model that leverages hardware-based security primitives and attestation mechanisms, illustrating trade-offs between decentralization, task size, and transparency overhead.
Digital services have been offered through remote systems for decades. The questions of how these systems can be built in a trustworthy manner and how their security properties can be understood are given fresh impetus by recent hardware developments, allowing a fuller, more general, exploration of the possibilities than has previously been seen in the literature. Drawing on and consolidating the disparate strains of research, technologies and methods employed throughout the adaptation of confidential computing, we present a novel, dedicated Confidential Remote Computing (CRC) model. CRC proposes a compact solution for next-generation applications to be built on strong hardware-based security primitives, control of secure software products' trusted computing base, and a way to make correct use of proofs and evidence reports generated by the attestation mechanisms. The CRC model illustrates the trade-offs between decentralisation, task size and transparency overhead. We conclude the paper with six lessons learned from our approach, and suggest two future research directions.