Securing Web Servers against Insider Attack

  • Authors:
  • S. Jiang;S. Smith;K. Minami

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACSAC '01 Proceedings of the 17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Too often, "security of Web transactions" reduces to"encryption of the channel"-and neglects to address whathappens at the server on the other end. This oversight forcesclients to trust the good intentions and competence of theserver operator-but gives clients no basis for that trust. Inthis paper, we apply secure coprocessing and cryptographyto solve this real problem in Web technology. We present avision: using secure coprocessors to establish trusted co-serversat Web servers and moving sensitive computationsinside these co-servers; we present a prototype implementationof this vision that scales to realistic workloads; andwe validate this approach by building a simple E-voting applicationon top of our prototype.By showing the real potential of COTS secure coprocessingtechnology to establish trusted islands of computation inhostile environments-such as at web servers with risk of insiderattack-this work also helps demonstrate that "securehardware" can be more than synonym for "cryptographicaccelerator."