Kettle: Attested builds for verifiable software provenance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Asad, Amean, Arko, André
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Asad, Amean
Arko, André
author_facet Asad, Amean
Arko, André
contents Kettle is an attested build system that produces cryptographically verifiable provenance for software built inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). A Kettle build records the source commit, dependency set, toolchain, build environment, and output artifact digests in a provenance document produced inside a measured confidential VM. The SHA-256 digest of that document is committed to the TEE platform's attestation report-data field, so the hardware-signed attestation report is itself the signature on the provenance, with the signing identity chaining to the TEE manufacturer's root of trust rather than to the build infrastructure operator. Because the CVM image is itself reproducible, its launch measurement is public and stable, which lets a build requester pre-attest the CVM before submitting any input and optionally deliver source over a TLS channel terminated inside it, so the build runs end-to-end confidentially without the host ever seeing source code in plaintext. Verification reduces to one signature check against the vendor root and a small set of digest comparisons, with no need to re-execute the build. The result removes the build infrastructure, its operators, and the artifact distribution channel from the trust surface a verifier must accept when deciding whether a binary corresponds to its claimed inputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Kettle: Attested builds for verifiable software provenance
Asad, Amean
Arko, André
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
D.2.0; D.4; K.6.5
Kettle is an attested build system that produces cryptographically verifiable provenance for software built inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). A Kettle build records the source commit, dependency set, toolchain, build environment, and output artifact digests in a provenance document produced inside a measured confidential VM. The SHA-256 digest of that document is committed to the TEE platform's attestation report-data field, so the hardware-signed attestation report is itself the signature on the provenance, with the signing identity chaining to the TEE manufacturer's root of trust rather than to the build infrastructure operator. Because the CVM image is itself reproducible, its launch measurement is public and stable, which lets a build requester pre-attest the CVM before submitting any input and optionally deliver source over a TLS channel terminated inside it, so the build runs end-to-end confidentially without the host ever seeing source code in plaintext. Verification reduces to one signature check against the vendor root and a small set of digest comparisons, with no need to re-execute the build. The result removes the build infrastructure, its operators, and the artifact distribution channel from the trust surface a verifier must accept when deciding whether a binary corresponds to its claimed inputs.
title Kettle: Attested builds for verifiable software provenance
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
D.2.0; D.4; K.6.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08363