Towards Trusted Service Monitoring: Verifiable Service Level Agreements

2025-10-15

AI Summary

SLA monitoring in service-oriented architectures faces a trust dilemma: self-reported compliance by service providers risks undetected violations. This paper proposes the first verifiable SLA monitoring framework leveraging trusted execution environments (TEEs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), enabling trustless verification of violation claims. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a semantic translation mechanism that converts machine-readable SLA clauses into formally verifiable assertions; (2) a privacy-preserving verification protocol integrating timestamped telemetry, Merkle-tree aggregation, and digital signatures—ensuring compliance validation without exposing raw data; and (3) ZKP generation and verification optimized to near-constant time complexity. The prototype achieves over one million monitored events per hour, demonstrating high scalability alongside strong security guarantees. The framework ensures integrity, authenticity, and validity of SLA enforcement, thereby strengthening accountability in distributed service ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring in service-oriented environments suffers from inherent trust conflicts when providers self-report metrics, creating incentives to underreport violations. We introduce a framework for generating verifiable SLA violation claims through trusted hardware monitors and zero-knowledge proofs, establishing cryptographic foundations for genuine trustworthiness in service ecosystems. Our approach starts with machine-readable SLA clauses converted into verifiable predicates and monitored within Trusted Execution Environments. These monitors collect timestamped telemetry, organize measurements into Merkle trees, and produce signed attestations. Zero-knowledge proofs aggregate Service-Level Indicators to evaluate compliance, generating cryptographic proofs verifiable by stakeholders, arbitrators, or insurers in disputes, without accessing underlying data. This ensures three security properties: integrity, authenticity, and validity. Our prototype demonstrates linear scaling up to over 1 million events per hour for measurements with near constant-time proof generation and verification for single violation claims, enabling trustless SLA enforcement through cryptographic guarantees for automated compliance verification in service monitoring.

Problem

• Verifying SLA violations through cryptographic proofs
• Resolving trust conflicts in self-reported service metrics
• Enabling automated compliance verification with trusted hardware

Innovation

• Trusted hardware monitors for SLA verification
• Zero-knowledge proofs aggregate service compliance indicators
• Merkle trees and attestations ensure data integrity