Alibaba Group Holding Limited

Yanhui Zhao

Li Shen

Xiaoning Li

Techniques for establishing a secure communication channel between a trusted portion of a system and another portion of the system and providing data over the secure communication channel are described herein. For example, a system may implement a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and a TEE component associated with the TEE. The TEE component may establish a secure communication channel with a Network Interface Controller (NIC) on the system, such as a smart NIC that is configured to encrypt/decrypt data and/or perform other operations. The TEE component may receive one or more cryptographic keys from a service provider and provide the one or more cryptographic keys to the NIC via the secure communication channel. The NIC may use the one or more cryptographic keys to encrypt data to send to another device, decrypt data that is received from another device, or otherwise encrypt/decrypt data.

Secure communication channel between encryption/decryption component and trusted execution environment

One embodiment provides a system for establishing a secure network. During operation, a server can distribute at least one symmetric encryption key among a plurality of hosts to enable the hosts to communicate securely with each other. Each host comprises at least a smart network interface card and a central processing unit (CPU) of each host computer supports remote attestation. Distributing the symmetric encryption key among the hosts can include performing a remote attestation operation to establish a trusted channel between the server and a protected region within the CPU of a respective host; and transmitting, over the trusted channel, the symmetric encryption key to the CPU of the respective host, which in turn forwards the symmetric encryption key to the smart network interface card of the respective host over a secure channel established between the protected region within the CPU and the smart network interface card.

Growing community of inventors

Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Yanhui Zhao