A remote attestation infrastructure for verifying the application of software updates

Cloud computing offers opportunities for organizations to reduce IT costs by using the computation and storage of a remote provider. Despite the benefits offered by the cloud computing paradigm, organizations are still wary of delegating their computation and storage to a cloud service provider due to trust concerns. The trust issues with the cloud can be addressed by a combinatiog of regulatory frameworks and supporting technologies. However, there appears to be little existing work that includes the application of software updates in trust assessment. Not applying software updates that fix security vulnerabilities can lead to serious problems. For example, the Canada Revenue Agency failed to update OpenSSL on their servers resulting in a temporary shutdown of tax filing. To address this issue we have developed a framework based on remote attestation and integrity measurements to address this problem. We showed that this could be effective in ensuring that software updates are done and our initial results suggests little run-time overhead.