Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud. Mike Bursell

Introduction

I am the sort of person who reads EULAs,¹ checks the expiry dates on fire extinguishers, examines the licensing notices in lifts (or elevators), and looks at the certificates on websites before I purchase goods from retailers or give away my personal details to sites purporting to be using my information for good in the world. Like many IT security professionals, I have a (hopefully healthy) disrespect for authority—or, maybe more accurately, for the claims made by authorities or those claiming to be authorities in the various fields of interest in which I've found myself involved over the years.

      Around 2001, I found myself without a job as my employer restructured, and I was looking for something to do. I had been getting interested in peer-to-peer interactions in computing, based on a project I'd been involved with at a previous company and the question of how trust relationships could be brokered in this sphere. I did a lot of reading in the area and nearly started a doctorate before getting a new job where finding time to do the requisite amount of study was going to be difficult. Not long after, my wife and I started trying for a family, and the advent of children in the household further reduced the amount of time—and concentration—available to study at the level of depth that I felt the subject merited.

Years went by, and I kept an eye on the field as my professional interests moved in a variety of different directions. Around 2013, I joined a group within ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) working on network function virtualisation (NFV). I quickly gravitated to the Security Working Group (Sec-WG), where I found several people with similar professional interests. One of those interests was trust, how to express it, how to define it, and how to operate systems that depended on it. We did some interesting work in the group, producing a number of documents that looked at particular aspects of telecommunications and trust, including the place of law enforcement agencies and regulators in the sector. As the telecommunications industry struggled to get its collective head around virtualisation and virtual machines (VMs), it became clear to the members of the security group that the challenges presented by a move to VMs were far bigger—and more complex—than might originally have been expected.

      Operators, as telecommunications providers are known in the industry—think Orange, Sprint, or NTT Docomo—have long known that they need to be careful about the hardware they buy and the software they run on it. There were a handful of powerful network equipment providers (NEPs) whose business model was building a monolithic software stack on top of well-defined hardware platforms and then selling it to the operators, sometimes running and monitoring it for them as well. The introduction of VMs offered the promise (to the operators) and the threat (to the NEPs) of a new model, where entrants into the market could provide more modular software components, some of which could run on less-specialised hardware. From the operators' point of view, this was an opportunity to break the NEPs' stranglehold on the industry, so they (the operators) were all for the new NFV world, while the NEPs were engaged in the ETSI process to try to show that they were still relevant.

      From the security point of view, we quickly realised that there was a major shift taking place from a starting point where operators were able to manage risk by trusting the one or two NEPs that provided their existing infrastructure. This was beginning to develop into a world where they needed to consider all of the different NFV vendors, the components they supplied, the interactions the components had with each other, and, crucially, the interactions the components had with the underlying infrastructure, which was now not going to be specialised hardware dedicated to particular functions, but generic computing hardware bought pretty much off the shelf. I think the Sec-WG thoroughly exasperated much of the rest of the ETSI NFV consortium with our continuous banging on about the problem, but we were equally exasperated by their inability to understand what a major change was taking place and the impact it could have on their businesses. The trust relationships between the various components was key to that, but trust was a word that was hardly even in the vocabulary of most people outside the Sec-WG.

At about the same time, I noticed a new trend in the IT security vendor market: people were beginning to talk about a new model for building networks, which they called zero trust. I was confused by this: my colleagues and I were spending huge amounts of time and effort trying to convince people that trust was important, and here was a new movement asserting that the best way to improve the security of your networking was to trust nothing. I realised after some research that the underlying message was more sophisticated and nuanced than that, but I also had a concern that the approach ignored a number of important abstractions and trust relationships. That concern has not abated as zero trust has been adopted as a rallying cry in situations where significantly less attention has been paid by those involved.

As virtualisation allowed the growth of cloud computing, and as Linux containers² and serverless computing have led to public cloud offerings that businesses can deploy simply and quickly, security is becoming more of a concern as organisations move from using cloud computing for the odd application here and there to considering it a key part of their computing infrastructure. The issue of trust, however, has not been addressed. From the (seemingly) simple question, “Do I trust my cloud service provider to run my applications for me?” to more complex considerations around dynamic architectures to protect data in transit, at rest, and in use, trust needs to be central to discussions about risk and security in private and public clouds, telecommunications, finance, government, healthcare, the Edge, IoT, automotive computing, blockchain, and AI.

      The subject of trust seems, at