Portunus: Re-imagining Access Control in Distributed Systems
summary
Portunus applies ciphertext-policy ABE to encrypt TLS private keys under customer-chosen locality policies, issues per-server attribute secret keys from a core key generation authority tied to a machine provisioning database, and stores encrypted keys in Quicksilver at the edge. Decryption happens locally when attributes match, otherwise the request proxies to the nearest authorized data center. Deployed across 400+ data centers and serving millions of requests per second, it replaces per-DC wrapping, trades moderate decryption overhead for scalability, and mitigates cost with cached elliptic-curve policy keys.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Portunus introduction
- 1:51TLS termination problem
- 4:01Private key access challenges
- 7:19Solution requirements
- 8:42Attribute-based encryption fit
- 11:57Portunus architecture
- 13:23Decryption performance
- 15:11Policy keys optimization
- 17:21ABE adoption challenges
- 19:29Portunus deployment lessons
- 20:55ABE takeaways
- 21:39Q&A
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