Title
Spy: A Method to Secure Clients for Network Services
Abstract
A fundamental problem in security is to guarantee correct program behavior on an un-trusted computer regardless of a user's actions. The problem appears in Digital Rights Management, Secure Boot, e-appliances, etc. All existing approaches are either partial or undependable. Today, dependable security is necessary not only for e-commerce, but also to ensure that, under critical conditions of information warfare, remote clients behave predictablyand securely, and cannot compromise the infrastructure.We prove that the problem of correct program execution is unsolvable without adoption of a trusted hardware platform. Since it is impractical to consider as trusted a complex computer system, we identify the minimal hardwaresupport that enables a complete solution. We propose two simple hardware mechanisms, which require minimal change to the currently popular PC architecture: (i) the use of a trusted "sealed" computing device, the "spy", and (ii)a hardware interrupt, called "two minute warning", which has the highest priority and has a pre-defined time difference from any subsequent interrupt. Finally, we incrementally build upon this minimal hardware support larger and more complex applications with guaranteed security. We call this construction the inverse security pyramid.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1109/ICDCSW.2002.1030743
ICDCS Workshops
Keywords
Field
DocType
minimal hardware support,network services,hardware platform,dependable security,minimal hardwaresupport,simple hardware mechanism,hardware interrupt,guaranteed security,inverse security pyramid,fundamental problem,minimal change,secure clients,spy,application software,computer networks,smart card,intellectual property,e commerce,computer security,information security,smart cards,hardware,content management,digital rights management
Interrupt,Computer security compromised by hardware failure,Computer security,Computer science,Information security,Smart card,Computer network,Information warfare,Content management,Application software,Digital rights management,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-1588-6
5
0.45
References 
Authors
8
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Richard J. Lipton164121796.57
Rajagopalan, S.250.45
Dimitrios N. Serpanos353973.29