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www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/abstracts/acsac04.shtml
Last modified: 11/26/04 02:48:43 PM

John Marchesini, Sean W. Smith, Omen Wild, Josh Stabiner, Alex Barsamian.
"Open-Source Applications of TCPA Hardware."
20th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference.
To appear, December 2004.

Abstract

How can Alice trust computation occurring at Bob's computer? Since it exists and is becoming ubiquitous, the current-generation TCPA/TCG hardware might enable a solution. When we started investigating this technology, the specification of the TCG software stack was not publicly available, and an implementation is still not; so, we designed and built an open-source platform based on Linux and commercially available TCPA/TCG hardware which would allow us to address the problem of trusting computation. Within the limits of TCPA/TCG hardware security, our solution balances what Alice needs to do to make trust judgments against what Bob needs to do to keep his system running.

Furthermore, we describe how we use our platform to harden three sample open-source applications: Apache SSL Web servers, OpenCA certification authorities, and (with SELinux) compartmented attestation to balance privacy with DRM.

To our knowledge, our project remains the only open-source TCPA/TCG platform in existence, and is also enabling trusted computing applications developed by our user community (enforcer.sourceforge.net reports over 1100 sourcecode downloads so far).

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