Remote attestation on legacy operating systems with trusted platform modules

  • Authors:

  • Dries Schellekens;Brecht Wyseur;Bart Preneel

  • Affiliations:

  • Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department ESAT/SCD-COSIC, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium and Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT), Belgium;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department ESAT/SCD-COSIC, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium and Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT), Belgium;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department ESAT/SCD-COSIC, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium and Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT), Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Science of Computer Programming
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

A lot of progress has been made to secure network communication, e.g., through the use of cryptographic algorithms. However, this offers only a partial solution as long as the communicating end points still suffer from security problems. A number of applications require remote verification of software executing on an untrusted platform. Trusted computing solutions propose to solve this problem through software and hardware changes, typically a secure operating system and the addition of a secure coprocessor, respectively. On the other hand, timed execution of code checksum calculations aims for a solution on legacy platforms, but can not provide strong security assurance. We present a mixed solution by using the trusted computing hardware, namely the time stamping functionality of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), in combination with a timing-based remote code integrity verification mechanism. In this way, the overall security of the timed execution scheme can be improved without requiring a secure operating system.