Trusted-Location-Control
Contents
Hardware assisted Geo Tagging
While the cloud enables workloads and data to reside anywhere, users may be constrained to run their workloads and save their data in certain geographies due to regulatory reasons. This extends beyond trusting the cloud's hardware resources to be free of malware and rootkits. Extensions to Trusted Compute Pools (TCP) enable associating with hardware at provision time geo-tags. Intel Trusted Execution Environment (TXT) and other measured launch environments (MLEs) facilitate measuring such provision time information into the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Attestation services can be used to ascertain that provision time meta data have not been tampered.
Asset and Geo Tags can be used to:
Monitor and Enforce policies to control placement, migration or bursting to trusted systems in specific geographical locations
- Control workload placement
- Provide Control and Visibility to Cloud End-users
- Display in dashboard the asset/geo associations of VM and hosts
- Generate audit logs of Hardware/VMs/data with asset/geo details.
Use Cases
Proposed Changes
Nova Aggregates and Availability Zones
The partitioning, resource reservation, and fault tolerance benefits that Nova aggregates and availability zones bring have a lot in common with geo tags. However, the main difference is that trusted tags are provision time values, and attached to the hardware resource. Re-purposing a machine is more easy via the command line with aggregates and availability zones, does not require machine reboot, but to modify trusted geo-tags more deliberate action is required, a machine reboot. The trusted geo-tag by virtue of being associated with a hardware root of trust is more valuable with respect to meeting regulatory requirements.
Further, the Attestation service could be independent of the cloud provider to increase credibility and better meet regulatory requirements. In addition, geo-tags can be verified with about 90% accuracy using software techniques using the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device being attested.
This blueprint details how geo-tags can be incorporated and taken advantage of in OpenStack clouds.
