Presents a collection of slides that address the topic of secure systems design. Some of the following topics are addressed: types of software and hardware attacks; need for system and data integrity; CPU virtualization; I/O virtualization; secure coprocessors; encrypted memory; and the key features and security capabilities of secure hypervisors and physical secure processors.

Presents a collection of slides covering the following topics: cyber security; software-only security; hardware support; hardware chip vendors; and hardware security.

Much effort has been spent to reduce the software Trusted Computing Base (TCB) of modern systems. However, there remains a large and complex hardware TCB, including memory, peripherals, and system buses. There are many stronger, but still realistic, adversary models where we need to consider that this hardware may be malicious or compromised. Thus, there is a practical need to determine whether we can achieve secure program execution in the presence of not only malicious software, but also malicious hardware.

Many people desire ubiquitous access to their personal computing environments. We present a system in which a user leverages a personal mobile device to establish trust in a public computing device, or kiosk, prior to resuming her environment on the kiosk. We have designed a protocol by which the mobile device determines the identity and integrity of all software loaded on the kiosk, in order to inform the user whether the kiosk is trustworthy. Our system exploits emerging hardware security technologies, namely the Trusted Platform Module and new support in x86 processors for establishing a dynamic root of trust. We have demonstrated the viability of our approach by implementing and evaluating our system on commodity hardware. Through a brief survey, we found that respondents are generally willing to endure a delay in exchange for an increased assurance of data privacy, and that the delay incurred by our unoptimized prototype is close to the range tolerable to the respondents. We have focused on allowing the user to personalize a kiosk by running her own virtual machine there. However, our work is generally applicable to establishing trust on public computing devices before revealing any sensitive information to those devices.

As Intel is rolling out its Vanderpool processor virtualization technology and AMD its Secure Virtual Machine technology, we are only seeing the first wave of processor virtualization assists. Over the next few years the x86 space will change dramatically. We will see the introduction of massive multi-core, 64-bit, 2 nd generation processor virtualization capabilities, I/O isolation capabilities, and hardware security assists.Both Intel and AMD are differentiating their processors by providing enhancements that enable you to run multiple virtual machines in such a way that the guest is unaware that it is being virtualized. Ironically, largely because these technologies have been unavailable for so long, Linux and Windows are going into a different direction: paravirtualization. With paravirtualization the guest operating system collaborates closely with the virtual machine monitor through a set of well defined software interfaces. This approach does not require any new hardware features at all and has the potential of performing much better. So, this raises an interesting dilemma: Some of the new virtualization capabilities may already be obsolete before they are brought to market.In this talk I will discuss the new virtualization technologies that will be introduced over the next few years, how they help virtualization, what challenges they pose and how these virtualization technologies will likely consolidate.

We present the sHype hypervisor security architecture and examine in detail its mandatory access control facilities. While existing hypervisor security approaches aiming at high assurance have been proven useful for high-security environments that prioritize security over performance and code reuse, our approach aims at commercial security where near-zero performance overhead, non-intrusive implementation, and usability are of paramount importance. sHype enforces strong isolation at the granularity of a virtual machine, thus providing a robust foundation on which higher software layers can enact finer-grained controls. We provide the rationale behind the sHype design and describe and evaluate our implementation for the Xen open-source hypervisor

We propose a primitive, called Pioneer, as a first step towards verifiable code execution on untrusted legacy hosts. Pioneer does not require any hardware support such as secure co-processors or CPU-architecture extensions. We implement Pioneer on an Intel Pentium IV Xeon processor. Pioneer can be used as a basic building block to build security systems. We demonstrate this by building a kernel rootkit detector.

In this paper we propose BIND (binding instructions and data), a fine-grained attestation service for securing distributed systems. Code attestation has recently received considerable attention in trusted computing. However, current code attestation technology is relatively immature. First, due to the great variability in software versions and configurations, verification of the hash is difficult. Second, the time-of-use and time-of-attestation discrepancy remains to be addressed, since the code may be correct at the time of the attestation, but it may be compromised by the time of use. The goal of BIND is to address these issues and make code attestation more usable in securing distributed systems. BIND offers the following properties: (1) BIND performs fine-grained attestation. Instead of attesting to the entire memory content, BIND attests only to the piece of code we are concerned about. This greatly simplifies verification. (2) BIND narrows the gap between time-of-attestation and time-of-use. BIND measures a piece of code immediately before it is executed and uses a sandboxing mechanism to protect the execution of the attested code. (3) BIND ties the code attestation with the data that the code produces, such that we can pinpoint what code has been run to generate that data. In addition, by incorporating the verification of input data integrity into the attestation, BIND offers transitive integrity verification, i.e., through one signature, we can vouch for the entire chain of processes that have performed transformations over a piece of data. BIND offers a general solution toward establishing a trusted environment for distributed system designers.

Intranet access has become an essential function for corporate users. At the same time, corporation's security administrators have little ability to control access to corporate data once it is released to remote clients. At present, no confidentiality or integrity guarantees about the remote access clients are made, so it is possible that an attacker may have compromised a client process and is now downloading or modifying corporate data. Even though we have corporate-wide access control over remote users, the access control approach is currently insufficient to stop these malicious processes. We have designed and implemented a novel system that empowers corporations to verify client integrity properties and establish trust upon the client policy enforcement before allowing clients (remote) access to corporate Intranet services. Client integrity is measured using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a new security technology that is becoming broadly available on client systems, and our system uses these measurements for access policy decisions enforced upon the client's processes. We have implemented a Linux 2.6 prototype system that utilizes the TPM measurement and attestation, existing Linux network control (Netfilter), and existing corporate policy management tools in the Tivoli Access Manager to control remote client access to corporate data. This prototype illustrates that our solution integrates seamlessly into scalable corporate policy management and introduces only a minor performance overhead.

We expect a future where we are surrounded by embedded devices, ranging from Java-enabled cell phones to sensor networks and smart appliances. An adversary can compromise our privacy and safety by maliciously modifying the memory contents of these embedded devices. In this paper, we propose a softWare-based attestation technique (SWATT) to verify the memory contents of embedded devices and establish the absence of malicious changes to the memory contents. SWATT does not need physical access to the device's memory, yet provides memory content attestation similar to TCG or NGSCB without requiring secure hardware. SWATT can detect any change in memory contents with high probability, thus detecting viruses, unexpected configuration settings, and Trojan Horses. To circumvent SWATT, we expect that an attacker needs to change the hardware to hide memory content changes. We present an implementation of SWATT in off-the-shelf sensor network devices, which enables us to verify the contents of the program memory even while the sensor node is running.

We describe the design of an extensible kernel, called Paramecium. This kernel uses an object-based software architecture which together with instance naming, late binding and explicit overrides enables easy reconfiguration. Determining which components reside in the kernel protection domain is up to the user. A certification authority or one of its delegates certifies which components are trustworthy and therefore permitted to run in the kernel protection domain. These delegates may include validation programs, correctness provers, and system administrators. The main advantage of certifications is that it can handle trust and sharing in a non-cooperative environment.