Enforcing Attestable Workflows across Untrusted Networks

TL;DR

The paper introduces extbackslash codename, a hardware-backed architecture for confidential, high-performance workflows across untrusted networks, achieving low latency and minimal overhead.

Contribution

It presents a split TCB design combining hardware-isolated control and kernel-enforced data plane for efficient, attested, encrypted routing in federated environments.

Findings

Achieves 6 microseconds per packet enforcement cost.

Imposes only 6.1% execution penalty over plaintext.

Initializes a 100-node cluster in under 1.5 seconds.

Abstract

Confidential high-performance computing orchestrates workloads across federated domains, yet existing frameworks rely on high-overhead user-space library operating systems or assume single-host execution. We propose \codename, an architecture federating Trusted Execution Environments via a split Trusted Computing Base (TCB) design. It couples a hardware-isolated Control Plane executing Mutually Attested Key Exchange (\make) with a measured guest-resident extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) Data Plane. By anchoring cryptographic key release to hardware measurements and executing enforcement in the kernel, \codename\ achieves native-speed encrypted routing. Empirical evaluation demonstrates a steady-state enforcement cost of $6\,\mu$s per packet, imposing a $13$--$15\,\mu$s absolute latency overhead. On distributed pipelines, \codename\ incurs just a $6.1\%$ execution penalty over plaintext baselines, bypassing the $62\%$ penalty of user-space counterparts. The system initializes a 100-node cluster in under 1.5 seconds, providing an efficient confidential interconnect for long-running workflows.