SBIR Phase I: Secure Computing using Pluggable Trust Technology

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the restoration of trust in computing systems. Successful cyberattacks, including mass privacy breaches and the discovery of device backdoors, have shaken trust in computing, put users at risk, hurt the economy, and even threatened our national security. The usual set of ad-hoc, incomplete, and costly approaches simply have not addressed the problem. This research effort will advance a viable, practical, and holistic solution that gives users much stronger guarantees of security while lowering the costs of keeping systems secure. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop TigerGuard, a computer system security architecture that contains the effects of cyberattacks on existing computer infrastructure. TrustGuard is based on a small, separately manufactured, and easy-to-verify hardware element, called the Sentry, that serves as the root of trust. The Sentry is a general-purpose hardware trust component that, when combined with an application-specific Dynamic Specification Check (DSC) software component, provides flexible containment capabilities. The containment guarantees of TigerGuard hold despite design and manufacturing flaws (known and not-yet-known, malicious and unintentional) in the operating system, firmware, hardware, and software, including those in the application software itself. Formal verification of both the Sentry and DSC, a practical effort given their total size of only a few thousand lines of code, becomes equivalent in security guarantees to proving hundreds of millions of existing lines of code correct (including the processor design, memory implementation, hard drive firmware, the operating system, shared libraries, and the application code).