A Revisit of Attestable Nodes for Networked Applications

A core security (or trustworthiness) question for all designs of networked applications persists: If distributed nodes connect, are these nodes trustworthy? Is it possible to assess a node’s software state before sharing data, programs and/or interacting with them? This paper revisits a scenario of assembling distributed, individual nodes for networked applications, such as data science compute nodes or bridge nodes connecting established applications to novel blockchain-related applications and their ecosystem. By taking advantage of special hardware support (Intel TXT), modern boot software that supports it (Trenchboot) and a custom attestation-before-joining protocol, we report on our prototype implementation how attestable nodes can be achieved today.