Why Your Cloud Security Is Probably Broken (And How Keylime Fixes It)

September 13, 2025

Hot take: Most “secure” cloud deployments are just expensive theater. You’ve got firewalls, access controls, endpoint protection - but what if someone compromises your bootloader before any of that even starts?

This isn’t theoretical. Real attackers are targeting the boot process, hypervisors, and kernel-level compromises that happen before your security stack loads. Your fancy SIEM won’t help if the system reporting to it has been compromised from day one.

The Trust Problem No One Talks About

Here’s what keeps me up at night: How do you trust a system you can’t physically touch?

When you spin up instances across AWS, Azure, GCP, or that new edge deployment, you’re essentially trusting that:

The hypervisor wasn’t compromised
The bootloader is legitimate
The kernel hasn’t been modified
No one injected malware before your OS even started

Traditional security assumes the underlying system is trustworthy. But that assumption is increasingly dangerous.

Enter Hardware-Based Attestation

This is where Keylime gets interesting. Instead of blind trust, it uses TPM 2.0 chips to provide cryptographic proof that your systems haven’t been tampered with.

Think of TPM as a tamper-resistant audit trail built into the hardware. Every step of the boot process gets measured and stored in Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs). Change anything - bootloader, kernel, initial programs - and the PCR values change, making tampering immediately detectable.

The game changer: Remote attestation. You can continuously verify the integrity of thousands of remote systems without physical access.

Real Production Impact

IBM deployed Keylime across their cloud infrastructure for FedRAMP and HITRUST compliance. George Almasi from IBM Research confirmed they’re using it for “measured boot attestation providing authenticity guarantees for UEFI and operating system components.”

This isn’t a research project - it’s production-grade infrastructure security.

Why This Matters Now

Three trends making hardware attestation critical:

1. Regulatory Pressure - FedRAMP, HITRUST, and similar frameworks increasingly require hardware-based security

2. Supply Chain Attacks - We’ve seen firmware compromises, malicious hardware, and sophisticated boot-level attacks

3. Zero Trust Reality - “Never trust, always verify” needs to extend to the hardware layer

The Implementation Reality

Keylime consists of three components:

Agents on monitored systems collecting TPM data
Verifiers continuously checking integrity against baselines
Registrars managing cryptographic keys and certificates

Beyond verification, it delivers encrypted payloads only to verified systems and triggers automated responses when tampering is detected.

The Deployment Reality Check

Real talk - Keylime isn’t plug-and-play. After seeing countless deployments, here are the issues that always come up:

TPM Access Hell: The device is disabled by default in BIOS on most systems. You’ll get cryptic Tss2_Tcti_Device_Init() Failed to open device file /dev/tpmrm0 errors until you enable it and fix permissions.

Certificate Chaos: TLS certificate management is where most people give up. Clock synchronization between components breaks everything, and getting the certificate chain configured correctly is an art form.

Version Compatibility Nightmares: TPM2-tools versions use completely different command syntax. Your deployment works fine, then someone updates the tools and everything breaks silently. Fun times debugging that.

Kubernetes Security Model Friction: Getting unprivileged pods to access TPM hardware requires specific device plugins and security contexts. Most people start with privileged pods just to get it working.

IMA False Positive Tsunami: Runtime monitoring generates so many false positives without proper allowlists that teams just disable it. Defeating the whole purpose.

Database Gotchas: Default SQLite won’t work for multi-verifier setups. You discover this after trying to scale, then have to migrate to MySQL/PostgreSQL.

Pro tip: Test with TPM emulator first to isolate hardware vs. configuration issues. Trust me on this one.

Looking Ahead

Hardware attestation is moving from “nice to have” to mandatory. As infrastructure becomes more distributed and threats more sophisticated, cryptographic proof of system integrity isn’t optional anymore.

The question isn’t whether to implement hardware attestation - it’s how quickly you can get started.

What’s your take? Are you seeing regulatory pressure for hardware-based security in your organization? Have you experimented with TPM-based attestation?

Drop your experiences in the comments - especially the war stories about what went wrong during deployment.