LSKV: A Confidential Distributed Datastore to Protect Critical Data in the Cloud

TL;DR

LSKV is a distributed datastore that enhances data confidentiality in cloud environments by leveraging trusted execution, enabling secure, trustworthy, and performant data storage similar to etcd.

Contribution

The paper introduces LSKV, a novel distributed datastore that integrates trusted execution environments to protect critical data from cloud providers, facilitating more trustworthy cloud services.

Findings

LSKV achieves performance comparable to etcd.

It effectively isolates data from cloud providers during execution.

LSKV simplifies building trustworthy cloud storage systems.

Abstract

Software services are increasingly migrating to the cloud, requiring trust in actors with direct access to the hardware, software and data comprising the service. A distributed datastore storing critical data sits at the core of many services; a prime example being etcd in Kubernetes. Trusted execution environments can secure this data from cloud providers during execution, but it is complex to build trustworthy data storage systems using such mechanisms. We present the design and evaluation of the Ledger-backed Secure Key-Value datastore (LSKV), a distributed datastore that provides an etcd-like API but can use trusted execution mechanisms to keep cloud providers outside the trust boundary. LSKV provides a path to transition traditional systems towards confidential execution, provides competitive performance compared to etcd, and helps clients to gain trust in intermediary services. LSKV forms a foundational core, lowering the barriers to building more trustworthy systems.