Monitoring Auditable Claims in the Cloud

Abstract: When deploying mission-critical systems in the cloud, where deviations may have severe consequences, the assurance of critical decisions becomes essential. Typical cloud systems are operated by third parties and are built on complex software stacks consisting of e.g., Kubernetes, Istio, or Kafka, which due to their size are difficult to be verified. Nevertheless, one needs to make sure that mission-critical choices are made correctly. We propose a flexible runtime monitoring approach that is independent of the implementation of the observed system that allows to monitor safety and data-related properties. Our approach is based on combining distributed Datalog-based programs with tamper-proof storage based on Trillian to verify the premises of safety-critical actions. The approach can be seen as a generalization of the Certificate Transparency project. We apply our approach to an industrial use case that uses a cloud infrastructure for orchestrating unmanned air vehicles.