Using Remote Attestation of Trust for Computer Forensics

Telecommunications systems are critical systems with high quality of service constraints. In Network Function Virtualization (NFV), commonly known as the Telco Cloud, network functions are distributed as virtual machines that run on generic servers in a datacenter. These network functions control critical elements; therefore, they should be run on trusted hardware. Trusted computing concepts can be used to guarantee the trustworthiness of the underlying hardware platform running critical workload. These concepts include the Trusted Platform Module and Remote Attestation. This work identifies limitations in existing solutions and uses those as motivation for designing and implementing a finer-grained definition of trust. This thesis designs and develops a remote attestation solution, which includes a policy and rule based mechanism for determining platform trust in a trusted cloud. Additionally, it develops a fine-grained concept of trust in a cloud environment based on NFV. Finally, this thesis utilizes the remote attestation solution to develop a forensics system based on root cause analysis, which allows the investigation of attestation failures and their mitigation