We introduce a secure architecture called an attested meter for advanced metering that supports large-scale deployments, flexible configurations, and enhanced protection for consumer privacy and metering integrity. Our study starts with a threat analysis for advanced metering networks and formulates protection requirements for those threats. The attested meter satisfies these through a unified set of system interfaces based on virtual machines and attestation for the software agents of various parties that use the meter. We argue that this combination provides a well-adapted architecture for advanced metering and we take a step towards demonstrating its feasibility with a prototype implementation based on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Xen Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). This is the first effort use virtual machines and attestation in an advanced meter. 1.

Abstract. Grid applications have increasingly sophisticated functional and security requirements. However, current techniques mostly protect only the resource provider from attacks by the user, while leaving the user comparatively dependent on the well-behavior of the resource provider. In this paper, we take the first steps towards addressing the trust asymmetry by using a combination of trusted computing and virtualization technologies. We present the key components for a trustworthy grid architecture and propose an implementation. By providing multilateral security, i.e., security for both the grid user and the grid provider, our architecture increases the confidence that can be placed on the correctness of a grid computation and on the protection of user-provided assets. To maintain important scalability and performance aspects, our proposal aims to minimize overhead. To this end, we also propose a scalable offline attestation protocol, which allows selection of partners in the grid with minimal overhead.

Mandatory access control (MAC) enforcement is becoming available for commercial environments. For example, Linux 2.6 includes the Linux Security Modules (LSM) framework that enables the enforcement of MAC policies (e.g., Type Enforcement or Multi-Level Security) for individual systems. While this is a start, we envision that MAC enforcement should span multiple machines. The goal is to be able to control interaction between applications on different machines based on MAC policy. In this paper, we describe a recent extension of the LSM framework that enables labeled network communication via IPsec that is now available in mainline Linux as of version 2.6.16. This functionality enables machines to control communication with processes on other machines based on the security label assigned to an IPsec security association. We outline a security architecture based on labeled IPsec to enable distributed MAC authorization. In particular, we examine the construction of a xinetd service that uses labeled IPsec to limit client access on Linux 2.6.16 systems. We also discuss the application of labeled IPsec to distributed storage and virtual machine access control. 1

Approaches for building secure, distributed systems have fundamental limitations that prevent the construction of dynamic, Internet-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a concept of a shared reference monitor or Shamon that we