Cloud Native Computing Foundation ServiceMeshCon North America 2021, 30 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Scalable Confidential Computing on Kubernetes with Marblerun- Moritz Eckert & Felix Schuster

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Scalable Confidential Computing on Kubernetes with Marblerun- Moritz Eckert & Felix Schuster, Edgeless Systems GmbH

Confidential computing (CC) is a new and emerging security paradigm. It enables the always encrypted and verifiable processing of data on potentially untrusted hosts, e.g., the cloud or maybe even your local cluster. Do you wanna add an extra layer of data protection to your Kubernetes workloads? In this talk, we introduce the open-source project Marblerun and discuss the challenges that arise when you deploy CC-enabled workloads on K8s. Marblerun is the control plane for confidential computing, designed to run on Kubernetes. It is an open-source solution that extends the confidentiality, integrity, and verifiability properties of a single enclave to a Kubernetes cluster. Marblerun does not replace your service mesh; it is built to run alongside your existing cloud-native tooling. In essence, Marblerun simplifies deploying, scaling, and verifying end-to-end encrypted apps on vanilla K8s. We will demo how to CC-fy a cloud-native app and run it with K8s+Linkerd+Marblerun.

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Hi everyone welcome to my talk. My name is felix schuster and today, I'm going to talk about scalable combination computing on kubernetes, with marblerun a few words about myself, I'm the ceo and co-founder of azure systems, and we are a startup building open source software for competition computing and one of the the tools that we build is marble run and marble run is an extension to your existing service mesh. That makes your deployment a confidential deployment.

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So what does this mean a couple of things? So first, this means that all your data remains encrypted all the time, even at run time during processing.

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Next, it means that you can cryptographically verify the integrity, the topology and functionality of your of your deployment, and you get protection against very strong attackers like malicious cloud, admins, malicious kubernetes, admins or even physical attackers like like data center insiders.

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So this sounds pretty cool right and it allows you to a couple of things. So it enables you to to retrofit your existing kubernetes deployments with top-notch security, and it allows you to essentially keep the cloud provider out of your trusted computing base and use a cloud with more confidence and move more workloads with the to the cloud, and it allows you to build exciting new applications that provably preserve the privacy of your data sources.

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Yeah, so this possibly sounds too good to be true, and so how do we do this?

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Obviously, there is no such thing as magic, so we rely on on a new technology called confidential computing and in a nutshell, combination computing is all about running sensitive workloads in so-called secure enclaves, and these enclaves are available on many recent server cpus, for example, from intel, and these ion classes have three defining properties, so they can run arbitrary software in in in strong isolation and no other system component like the operating system, the hypervisor, other apps or or even even other hardware components can can look inside an enclave or interfere interfere with an iclick.

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um The second important security feature is runtime encryption, so everything that is stored or is running inside an enclave remains encrypted in main memory. Even at runtime and the final property is verifiability, so you can get a certificate from your cpu that says: okay hi, I am a genuine intel cpu and I'm running this piece of of code in in my secure enclave, and this is a very strong property and we use this to build android verifiability.

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For for your whole cluster with smartphone, so competent computing hardware is widely available and you can get it in your favorite clouds and we for now, with small, run only support azure, but we are working on bringing it to to other clouds and other hardware members, okay. So let's, let's dig into the details.

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So how do we create a confidential deployment? Essentially, there are two steps. First, one you need to build competition containers and that is fairly easy. So if you, if your app is entirely written in go, then you can just use our open source go framework to just take your app and package it for for non-claim.

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So that's done so. The last and final step is to securely mesh your services in inside your deployment at runtime and this week. This is what marlborough takes care of, and this requires a couple of steps.

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So first, we really want to have container to cos to container at the station, so one container running inside an enclave needs to make sure that the other container it's talking to is also running inside an enclave, that's very important, because otherwise we could have mock-up enclaves, they could just steal secrets.

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Next, we want to have deployment to client at the station, so we want clients of our deployment to be able to verify the overall integrity and functionality of of the deployment.

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Next, we we need mtls to not terminate inside sidecar proxies but directly inside our cqrn class, because otherwise it could be intercepted by attackers and we need enclave-based sequence management. So we can't rely on kubernetes for secrets management because in our case, kubernetes is running outside our enclaves. So it is not part of our trusted computing base and the attackers we consider it could just can just access the kubernetes secret store. And finally, we also take care of of code updates in a secure way and from a 10, 000 feed point of view.

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This is what the workflow looks like when you install marber, so you start with an empty kubernetes deployment and you do as normal. You install your favorite service mesh, for example, linker d, and next thing you do. Is you install mabaron using the malware on cli, and then you do very important step, and that is you define in in the file called manifest? You define in json all the confidential computing specific aspects of your deployment.

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And the final step, is you install your app as normal and if you packaged your app with with ego, then your containers will automatically contact the marble run coordinator over secure and mutually attest. The tls connections and mabaron will make sure that these containers adhere to the manifest and only if they, if they do, if they comply with the manifest marble run, will issue tls credentials to these containers and will also send over the the other secrets and the next the client can come.

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The client can establish a huge connection to you to your deployment and this connection also terminates directly inside a secure enclave. So it's really end to end secure and what the client also can do is the client can get an attestation statement from the marble and coordinator and by ex examining that statement, the client can convince themselves that this cluster or this deployment adheres to what is specified in this manifest, and this is a very powerful feature.

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Okay, so there's one app we like to use for demo purposes and it's emoji photo it's the default demo from the link of the service mesh, and if you want to run this in mavro- and it's super simple, you just package the three services using using ego, you don't need to change a single line of code and you define the manifest. The manifest in this case is only 130 30 lines of of json and then you're good to go, and you can just use marble run and let it take care of the rest.

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Okay and here's. Here's the the manifest for the emoji bottle demo, and in the first section we define all the angles that are allowed to run in our deployment. In this case, we have, we have three enclaves and they are defined by by the by by their signature's fingerprint and down. Here we define the the parameters for the enclaves, um in this case mostly environment rivals, but this could also be files, for example, and further down, we define the secrets that live inside this deployment.

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In this case, we just have one secret, which is a webcert, and these secrets get automatically injected into the right enclaves and marblerun takes care of that right. This was my quick introduction to marvel run. I hope you found this interesting to summarize what mamaron does is. It turns your existing deployment into a confidential deployment, and this is super exciting, because this keeps all your data encrypted at all the times even during processing, and it allows you to verify the integrity and functionality of your deployment even better.

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It protects against very strong attackers like malicious kubernetes, admins, malicious cloud, admins or malicious data center workers, and it enables cool new applications that preserve the privacy of your data sources.

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Next steps um check out madram.sh for code further examples, and if you have any questions, feel free to join the discord, and you can find me on twitter at flxflx and yeah. Let's keep in touch. Let me know what you think and goodbye.