A Secure Scheme for Chained Authentication Combined with Attestation

It may be desirable to split computation into several parts and perform them on remote systems, see e.g. microservices. However, not always are these services directly and publicly available. For instance, if the calculation is performed at home, no public IP address may be available. Or the exact location of the computation should remain hidden. In these cases, the remote party may be identified solely as a Tor onion service or some anonymous cloud provider. It is then desirable to pass on the work only if the recipient can still be identified as trustworthy, e.g. by remote attestation (guaranteeing a specific calculation via the actual executable and its secure environment). Even if the location and identity of the operator is known, this is very desirable. Moreover, each entity in a chain of calculation should remain oblivious of all non-directly connected steps and any authentication information for those, including any additional data or the exact work instructions. This paper proposes a scheme to pass on work packages in a secure manner to a verified next step, while keeping all non-directly involved data hidden.