A Scalable Trustworthy Infrastructure for Collaborative Container Repositories

Abstract

Within cloud computing containerization has become ubiquitous. As the availability of pre-built containers increases there is a need for methods capable of efficiently securing large repositories of software containers. We present a “Trustworthy Container Repository” (TCR) system which provides security assurances (confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity) regarding such a repository in a scalable manner. Trust within the TCR architecture is rooted in a low-complexity, tamper-resistant trusted module, which leverages index-ordered Merkle trees (IOMTs) to efficiently track a large number of container images and provide assurances of repository integrity to its users. The key contributions of the study are, identification of the required security model, a novel TCR data-structure, and verifiable algorithms to operate on it. Through experiment, we observe closely logarithmic time complexity of the proposed system up to a high container count ( N = 2 25 ≈ 10 7 ).

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