Secure Onboarding of Devices and Applications to a Smart Decentralized Ecosystem

Data Confidence Fabrics (DCFs) are emerging as a mechanism to obtain measurable trust in decentralized smart computing environments, while remote attestation (RA) is being established as a key mechanism for verifying security in distributed systems. However, both of these approaches remain underutilized in container orchestration platforms, resulting in inadequate trust guarantees, increased attack surface areas, and insufficient mechanisms for verifying the integrity of devices and applications. In this paper, we propose leveraging DCFs to integrate RA with software security practices, and utilizing this integration to securely onboard devices and containerized applications by tracing their provenance and analyzing vulner-abilities. This dual-level protection bridges device attestation measurements with measurements of application security to provide measurable and transparent confidence scores for both. The proposed approach brings trustworthiness into a distributed environment where devices are continuously monitored for malicious tampering, and applications are assessed before being run. We verified this approach on a setup representing real environments. Additionally, a machine learning model was put under test and trained on data weighted with confidence scores produced by our proposed approach. The model saw improved performance and accuracy, showing that this approach can increase the reliability of systems.