Secure coprocessing applications and research issues

Abstract

The potential of secure coprocessing to address many emerging security challenges and to enable new applications has been a long-standing interest of many members of the Computer Research and Applications Group, including this author. The purpose of this paper is to summarize this thinking, by presenting a taxonomy of some potential applications and by summarizing what we regard as some particularly interesting research questions.

Open-Source Applications of TCPA Hardware

“…In some ways, our work extends earlier research into secure coprocessors (e.g., [32,42,43]). Secure coprocessors have been shown to be feasible as commercial products [5,35] and can even run Linux and modern build tools [9], and even provided versions of the TCPA/TCG properties of safe computation, sealed storage, and even attestation [34].…”

Security Protocols for Outsourcing Database Services

“…60 Although these hardwarebased solutions may satisfy security objectives in several applications (see Table 1), there are still a matter of controversy. 61,62,63 For the security protocols that will be introduced in this article, it is assumed that such a special hardware is not needed and we rely solely on the available software/ hardware infrastructure. Several recent noteworthy approaches not employing any special hardware were also introduced.…”

A Tamper-Resistant Programming Language System

“…Crypto-paging [15,30] is a well-known and straightforward approach to managing replay. In its simplest form, each page in host memory has a corresponding cryptographic signature stored in the protected memory of the secure co-processor.…”