arXiv subjects

Silvio Dragone

Publications and source records attributed to Silvio Dragone.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

ACE: Towards A High-Assurance Isolated Virtualization Environment for RISC-V

Confidential computing has proven its value in cloud environments, but its potential for securing edge and high-end embedded systems (e.g., automotive controllers, cryptographic accelerators, telco infrastructure) remains largely unexplored. We present ACE, an open-source, royalty-free virtualization-based confidential computing system for RISC-V targeting these environments. ACE isolates software into confidential virtual machines with narrow, well-defined interfaces, building exclusively on commodity RISC-V hardware without specialized hardware extensions or licensing fees. Our prototype evaluation on the first commercially available RISC-V hardware supporting virtualization shows that ACE is a viable candidate for our target systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Scalable Attestation of Virtualized Execution Environments in Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud

Existing attestation mechanisms lack scalability and support for heterogeneous virtual execution environments (VEEs), such as virtual machines and containers executed inside or outside hardware isolation on different vendors' hardware in clouds managed by various organizations. To overcome these limitations, hardware vendors and cloud providers implement proprietary mechanisms (Intel DCAP, Amazon NitroTPM, Google Titan) to support their offerings. However, due to their plurality, the attestation becomes cumbersome because it increases maintenance and integration costs and reduces portability required in hybrid- and multi-cloud deployments. We introduce WAWEL, a framework that enables scalable attestation of heterogeneous VEEs. WAWEL can be plugged into existing hardware-specific attestation mechanisms, offering a unified interface. WAWEL supports the widely adopted trusted platform module (TPM) attestation standard. We implemented a prototype and integrated it with three different VEEs. It supports runtime integrity attestation with Linux integrity measurement architecture (IMA) and legacy applications requiring zero-code changes. The evaluation demonstrated that the WAWEL prototype achieves very good performance and scalability despite the indirections between the VEE and hardware root of trust.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Synergia: Hardening High-Assurance Security Systems with Confidential and Trusted Computing

High-assurance security systems require strong isolation from the untrusted world to protect the security-sensitive or privacy-sensitive data they process. Existing regulations impose that such systems must execute in a trustworthy operating system (OS) to ensure they are not collocated with untrusted software that might negatively impact their availability or security. However, the existing techniques to attest to the OS integrity fall short due to the cuckoo attack. In this paper, we first show a novel defense mechanism against the cuckoo attack, and we formally prove it. Then, we implement it as part of an integrity monitoring and enforcement framework that attests to the trustworthiness of the OS from 3.7x to 8.5x faster than the existing integrity monitoring systems. We demonstrate its practicality by protecting the execution of a real-world eHealth application, performing micro and macro-benchmarks, and assessing the security risk.

cs.CR↗