Outsourcing computation to cloud service providers is now common practice for designing cost-effective information
systems. The underlying trust assumptions are asymmetric: an application provider outsourcing computation to a service
provider trusts the latter to carry out the computation correctly, to preserve its confidenitiality and to measure
and charge for resource usage accurately. The basis for application providers' trust rests primarily on the
reputation of large cloud service providers.
There are two developments that call such trust into question. First is the emergence of ``function-as-a-service"
(FaaS), a type of serverless computing that allows application providers to specify functions they want
executed, leaving the service provider to decide how to run, scale and load-balance the computation. Unlike the
traditional Infrastucture-as-a-Service paradigm, FaaS requires metering and billing resource usage at a much finer
granularity at the level of function invocations.
Second, there is a trend towards decentralized computing where computation is outsourced small ephemeral service
providers, such as people with spare computation capacity. The highly dynamic nature of FaaS is likely to
accelerate this trend.
Taken together, these two developments call for the means to securely outsource computing even to small-scale computation
service providers while guaranteeing integrity and confidentiality of computing and ensuring that resource
accounting is done accurately and fairly (for both the application provider and the computation service provider).
In this talk, I will introduce the problem and discuss our recent work that proposed an approach to address the problem
by making use of hardware-assisted trusted execution environments and remote attestation.
N. Asokan is a Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University where he co-leads the Secure Systems Group and directs
Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security HAIC. For more information on Asokan's work, take a look at his web page at
https://asokan.org/asokan/ or follow him on Twitter at @nasokan.