Portunus - Re-imagining Access Control in Distributed Systems

Explore a groundbreaking approach to access control in distributed systems through this conference talk from USENIX ATC '23. Delve into Portunus, an innovative cryptographic storage and access control system that leverages attribute-based encryption (ABE) to address the challenges of TLS termination in network and security infrastructure. Learn how this system balances the need for low-latency operations with increasing regulatory demands for sophisticated key access controls. Discover how Portunus enables customer-defined policies for TLS key protection, allows servers to decrypt only authorized keys based on their attributes, and eliminates the need for a centralized coordinator. Gain insights into the system's implementation across Cloudflare's global network, handling millions of requests per second and representing one of the largest deployments of ABE to date.