Cover feature - A trusted open platform

Trusted Computing, Trusted Third Parties, and Verified Communications

“…Similarly, however, it has been argued that protected execution environments enable censorship and other worrisome applications [2]. Beyond DRM, NGSCB could be employed for secure document signing and transaction authorization [11], for instance. Notwithstanding such intriguing ideas, it appears that the thinking about applications remains active, and far from complete.…”

“…Fairly elaborate mechanisms for naming code are a probable component of SCBs in any case, for attestation [17,11]. No new such mechanisms may be needed for our purposes.…”

“…This paper considers new trusted third parties that may appear within general-purpose computing platforms as a result of several current efforts. Those efforts include substantial projects in industry, such as the work of the former Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) and its successor the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), and Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB, formerly known as Palladium) [11]. They also include research projects such as XOM [19] and Terra [13].…”

Using NGSCB to Mitigate Existing Software Threats

“…This is a powerful new security primitive, creating new levels of assurance for computations performed by remote computers, and allowing administrators to project policy to remote platforms. Attestation is described in various levels of detail by England et al and in the various white papers [Trusted Computing Group, 2003, England et al, 2003, Microsoft, 2003d published by Microsoft [Microsoft, 2003b]. It makes use of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), along with various cryptographic certificates, to prove that a specific hardware and software stack is NGSCB-enabled, and can be trusted to operate as expected.…”

Optimal parameter selection for efficient memory integrity verification using merkle hash trees

“…In the example above, a game server should allow clients to connect only if their binary is verified to not be hacked at the time of connection (achieved through attestation), and if the connected game client can execute in a tamperproof environment where the binary cannot be modified after connection (achieved through tamperproof execution). This latter mechanism has been the subject of much recent work [12,11,18,6,7], buoyed by the emergence of hardware support for secure execution in general-purpose computers [19] and industry support for secure execution as in Microsoft's Palladium [4]. All mechanisms for tamperproof execution proposed to date rely on costly cryptographic hashes to detect modifications to memory; however, none minimize the cost of hashing.…”