Knative poses two primary concerns for application confidentiality and trust: data leakage and unverified event sources.
Data Leakage
Knative has faced criticism for the potential risk of data leakage within its event-driven architecture. As events flow through the Knative system, there is a possibility that sensitive data within those events may be inadvertently exposed to unauthorized parties. Without proper measures to enforce data confidentiality, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to organizations that handle sensitive or regulated data. The leakage of such data can lead to breaches, privacy violations, and potential legal and financial consequences.
Unverified Event Sources
Another critique of Knative is its lack of verification mechanisms for event sources. Knative relies on external sources to trigger events and initiate serverless functions. However, without proper validation of these event sources, there is a risk of malicious or untrusted sources triggering unintended or potentially harmful actions within the Knative environment. This vulnerability becomes particularly concerning when integrating with third-party event sources or when operating in environments where the trustworthiness and integrity of event sources are critical, such as financial transactions or healthcare systems.
Solution
To address these concerns, enclaive leverages hardware secure enclave technology to enhance the confidentiality and trustworthiness of Knative applications. This solution focuses on providing strong data confidentiality and validating event sources to ensure the integrity of the event-driven system.
The framework has been meticulously designed to simplify the deployment of secure Knative applications while ensuring straightforward operation and management. Our primary objective was to incorporate existing Knative workflows and practices familiar to DevOps professionals and engineers while leveraging hardware secure enclave technology to enhance security. The key components of this solution are as follows:
Secure Event Processing
Within the framework, event processing occurs within a secure enclave powered by Intel SGX technology. This ensures that sensitive data within events remains confidential, even as they flow through the Knative system. By encrypting event data in memory and applying secure processing mechanisms, Secure Event Processing protects against unauthorized data leakage and exposure.
Verified Event Sources
Our solution incorporates mechanisms to validate the trustworthiness and integrity of event sources. This includes cryptographic validation and certificate-based authentication to ensure that only trusted and verified sources can trigger events within the Knative environment. By validating event sources, the system mitigates the risk of unintended actions and malicious events.
To ensure simplicity for our customers (engineers, DevOps), we have adopted the following role model:
The Service Provider offers a secure Knative environment, comprising:
Knative infrastructure with hardware secure enclave.
Secure Event Processing components within the environment.
The customer's responsibilities include:
Deploying and configuring their Knative applications within the secure environment provided by the Service Provider.
Ensuring the confidentiality of event data by leveraging the Secure Event Processing capabilities.
Validating and configuring trusted event sources within their applications.
It is important to note that the security and trustworthiness of Knative applications rely on the utilization of secure processing components and validated event sources, which are integral to the effectiveness of the solution.