It's a Feature, Not a Bug: Secure and Auditable State Rollback for Confidential Cloud Applications Article Swipe

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Quinn Burke , Michael M. Swift , Patrick McDaniel ·

YOU? · · 2025 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2511.13641

Replay and rollback attacks threaten cloud application integrity by reintroducing authentic yet stale data through an untrusted storage interface to compromise application decision-making. Prior security frameworks mitigate these attacks by enforcing forward-only state transitions (state continuity) with hardware-backed mechanisms, but they categorically treat all rollback as malicious and thus preclude legitimate rollbacks used for operational recovery from corruption or misconfiguration. We present Rebound, a general-purpose security framework that preserves rollback protection while enabling policy-authorized legitimate rollbacks of application binaries, configuration, and data. Key to Rebound is a reference monitor that mediates state transitions, enforces authorization policy, guarantees atomicity of state updates and rollbacks, and emits a tamper-evident log that provides transparency to applications and auditors. We formally prove Rebound's security properties and show through an application case study -- with software deployment workflows in GitLab CI -- that it enables robust control over binary, configuration, and raw data versioning with low end-to-end overhead.

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Type: preprint
Landing Page: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13641
PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13641
OA Status: green
OpenAlex ID: https://openalex.org/W4416364037

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2511.13641

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Title: It's a Feature, Not a Bug: Secure and Auditable State Rollback for Confidential Cloud Applications

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Type: preprint

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Publication year: 2025

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Publication date: 2025-11-17

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Authors: Quinn Burke, Michael M. Swift, Patrick McDaniel

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Landing page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13641

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PDF URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13641

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OA URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13641

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Cited by: 0

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