HTTPA: HTTPS Attestable Protocol

TL;DR

HTTPA extends HTTPS by integrating remote attestation, leveraging trusted execution environments like Intel SGX, to enhance security and trustworthiness of web services and data privacy.

Contribution

The paper introduces HTTPA, a novel protocol extension that incorporates remote attestation into HTTPS, enabling secure, trustworthy web interactions with hardware-based guarantees.

Findings

HTTPA provides security assurances for web requests.

It unifies web attestation with Internet access in a standard way.

The protocol enhances trustworthiness of web services.

Abstract

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocol has become an integral part of modern Internet technology. Currently, it is the primary protocol for commercialized web applications. It can provide a fast, secure connection with a certain level of privacy and integrity, and it has become a basic assumption on most web services on the Internet. However, HTTPS alone cannot provide security assurances on request data in computing, so the computing environment remains uncertain of risks and vulnerabilities. A hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE) such as Intel Software Guard Extension (Intel SGX) or Intel Trust Domain Extensions (Intel TDX) provides in-memory encryption to help protect runtime computation to reduce risks of illegal leaking or modifying private information. (Note that we use SGX as an example for illustration in the following texts.) The central concept of SGX enables computation inside an enclave, a protected environment that encrypts the codes and data pertaining to a security-sensitive computation. In addition, SGX provides security assurances via remote attestation to the web client to verify, including TCB identity, vendor identity, and verification identity. Here, we propose an HTTP protocol extension, called HTTPS Attestable (HTTPA), by including a remote attestation process onto the HTTPS protocol to address the privacy and security concerns on the web and the access of trust over the Internet. With HTTPA, we can provide security assurances for verification to establish trustworthiness with web services and ensure the integrity of request handling for web users. We expect that remote attestation will become a new trend adopted to reduce the security risks of web services. We propose the HTTPA protocol to unify the web attestation and accessing Internet services in a standard and efficient way.