by distributing the load across all enterprise devices.
However, some data must be shared with a central
entity to enable cross-device correlations. The agent
is responsible for communicating with the central
aggregator and sending relevant data periodically or
upon request. The agent also responds to
configuration changes pushed from the central
aggregator in response to changing monitoring needs.
The monitoring agents process security sensitive
information related to device, operating system, or
application anomalies and compromises, and they
initiate the transmission of this as active entities, so
they must be authenticated much like the endpoint
device management agents. The monitoring agent
keys are stored in the TPM and used to initiate TLS
connections to central servers. The agent
authenticates using its key, and this is coupled to an
endpoint device management agent’s attestation
report that certifies the operational state of the device.
Because monitoring agents and endpoint device
management agents are both part of the standard ELS
infrastructure, such attestation reports can be shared
among the backend servers through a common
storage system.
With a TPM attestation report from the endpoint
device management system, the device’s state is
established as “clean.” Such a clean device can then
be trusted to authenticate and provide proper
information from all of the agents covered by the
attestation report, including the monitoring agent.
The monitoring agent then provides further
information about potentially malicious activity on
the device itself. This information can include details
of malicious operating system configuration changes,
such as rooting, or malicious or anomalous
application activities, such as accessing or requesting
resources that are restricted.
4.3 Log Aggregation Agents
Log aggregation agents periodically assemble the
relevant log content from the device, which may
include monitoring logs, browser history, key usage,
location history, network utilization rates, or other
information as configured by the enterprise. They
then send this information to an aggregator, which
may further aggregate it at the enterprise level. The
log information from a single device is packaged as a
signed message that can be passed through multiple
aggregators without loss of security properties. The
intermediate aggregators are not active entities
because they do not modify the data packages. They
only provide performance benefits, such as load
balancing or aggregation of data packets.
Log records can come from the hardware, in
which case an attestation report is a natural security
measure. They can also come from the operating
system, which is often tightly coupled with a SKSU
module, and again the attestation report is a natural
choice for security. The challenge is application-layer
logging, which may not be completely in control of
the application that generates it. The operating
system, in particular, may interfere with the log file
management, make it available to other applications,
or directly modify it. The operating system could also
act on behalf of the application when requesting
logging related activities. Again, the attestation report
for the software on the device provides a method to
secure against a modified or compromised operating
system. The system attestation report combined with
the log attestation report provides the needed security
for transferring the log record to the central
aggregator.
The log aggregator has a unique position. It is a
passive entity with respect to the content of the log
records. These are signed by the log aggregation
agents on individual devices, so such content cannot
be modified by the aggregator. However, the
aggregator does have an important active role to play
in validating the integrity of the signature. The
aggregator must validate the attestation report for the
device that signed the log record. A bad attestation
report implies that the signature cannot be trusted, and
the log aggregator is the point where this is checked.
The log aggregator signs valid log records and refuses
to sign invalid log records. The aggregator serves as
an active entity in providing its own validation but a
passive entity with respect to the signed log records
themselves.
The central aggregator need not be a central point
of failure for log record security. Confidentiality is
difficult to provide due to the nature of the
aggregator, but integrity is often more important for
log-related applications. The signatures by the
device-based keys and certificates, combined with a
validation of their attestation reports, provides a high
level of integrity for such records. For aggregation
functions, it may be necessary to strip the signatures
and use the raw data for further processing. In this
case, there is no direct method to validate the
processed data, but because all original data is signed,
it is possible to independently validate such
computations. Thus, the central aggregator is a single
point of aggregation, but is not a single point of
integrity vulnerability due to the device signatures for
individual records.