Flicker: an execution infrastructure for tcb minimization

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan M. McCune;Bryan J. Parno;Adrian Perrig;Michael K. Reiter;Hiroshi Isozaki

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present Flicker, an infrastructure for executing security-sensitive code in complete isolation while trusting as few as 250 lines of additional code. Flicker can also provide meaningful, fine-grained attestation of the code executed (as well as its inputs and outputs) to a remote party. Flicker guarantees these properties even if the BIOS, OS and DMA-enabled devices are all malicious. Flicker leverages new commodity processors from AMD and Intel and does not require a new OS or VMM. We demonstrate a full implementation of Flicker on an AMD platform and describe our development environment for simplifying the construction of Flicker-enabled code.