Turtles all the way down: research challenges in user-based attestation

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan M. McCune;Adrian Perrig;Arvind Seshadri;Leendert van Doorn

  • Affiliations:
  • CMU/CyLab;CMU/CyLab;CMU/CyLab;AMD

  • Venue:
  • HOTSEC'07 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX workshop on Hot topics in security
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Current trusted computing technologies allow computing devices to verify each other, but in a networked world, there is no reason to trust one computing device any more than another. Treating these devices as turtles, the user who seeks a trustworthy system from which to verify others quickly realizes that it's "turtles all the way down" because of the endless loop of trust dependencies. We need to provide the user with one initial turtle (the iTurtle) which is axiomatically trustworthy, thereby breaking the dependency loop. In this paper, we present some of the research challenges involved in designing and using such an iTurtle.