Challenges in monitoring large scale secure applications.

Abstract

One of the major concerns for researchers and application developers is to safeguard user’s privacy. To provision secure applications developers and researchers are making use of trusted execution environments. This enables isolation for data processing and secure communications across entities. The cost of provisioning such applications comes in availability and scalability for high load systems. Running production and large scale trusted applica tions can be very resource intensive. Therefore, achieving certain quality requirements for these applications and maintaining the trustworthiness is a challenge. In this paper we propose an environment system capable of provisioning secure applications in a large infrastructure for variable load demand. The system can be provisioned in any set of machines with access to Intel SGX hardware. We enabled the monitoring of application and infrastructure metrics with information specific to the security hardware, which can be later used to make scheduling and setup decisions. In a current large-scale operation, we observed that the average response times across all servers were elevate in the initial parts of experiments, but the operation latency values were around 10 ms, showing good scalability and providing confidence that the system would work satisfactorily in production.