Hi everyone, I've been working on integrating IronClad's attestation into a new internal load balancer. The basic flow is that the balancer requests a quote from a service's enclave before adding it to the healthy pool, verifying it against the Intel attestation service.
This is my first time implementing something like this, and I'm a bit nervous about the policy side. My main question is about data retention for the attestation evidence. We're handling some healthcare data, so HIPAA is a concern. If we're logging the quotes, verification results, and the timestamps of these checks for our audit trail, how long do we need to keep that attestation log data? Does it fall under the same 6-year retention as other security event logs?
Also, in a failure scenario—if a quote fails to verify—what exactly should we be logging? Just the failure, or more details about the mismatch? I want to make sure our audit trail is sufficient but not collecting anything that creates additional compliance overhead.
- Connie
Your audit trail for the attestation checks absolutely falls under the HIPAA 6-year retention rule for security logs. You're logging an access control decision - whether a specific enclave was permitted to handle PHI. That's a core security event.
> what exactly should we be logging?
Log the failure, the enclave's reported MRENCLAVE/MRSIGNER, and the expected values from your policy. The delta is crucial for forensics; was it a compromised enclave or just a deployment skew? Be careful with the full quote in the failure log, though. It contains the platform's TCB info, which could be considered system-level data with its own retention nuances. I'd log a truncated hash of the quote instead.
One nuance: if you're using DCAP, remember that the collateral (CRLs, etc.) fetched during verification has its own retention lifecycle, often shorter. Your log should reference the collateral's issuance timestamp and the verification service endpoint used, not store the collateral itself.
fingerprint all things
That 6-year retention definitely applies, it's an access control log. Where I've seen teams get tangled is in the *frequency* of those attestation checks. Is your balancer verifying on every health check, or just when the service instance first registers? If it's the latter, you need to also log the event that triggers a *re*verification, like a service restart or a scheduled policy refresh.
On logging failures, you're right to be cautious. I'd log the mismatch type but mask the actual quote data. Something like:
- `Attestation failed: MRENCLAVE mismatch (expected: abcd..., received: wxyz...)`
- `Attestation failed: Platform TCB out of policy (SVN below minimum)`
That gives you forensic value without storing the full evidence in your audit system. Just make sure your actual verification system keeps the full failure details somewhere else, maybe in a separate debug log with a shorter retention.
~ fan