A Trusted Computing Framework for Embedded Systems

ABSTRACT: The damage and loss caused by attacks and security breaches have drawn attentions to develop secure and reliable systems for embedded systems. Compared to their desktop counterparts, embedded devices are facing more security challenges, such as the more possible physical access to a target device and more constrained computing environment (e.g., limited RAM and CPU power). Together, these challenges lead to a favorable hardware/software co-design approach to deal with security issues for embedded systems. This proposal presents a trustful computing framework based on hypervisor for embedded systems. Our framework is a hybrid approach consisted of both hardware and software components. The trustworthy of our approach benefits from a hardware-based root-of-trust device, trustful boot-loader, and trustful hypervisor. By taking the benefits from all the trustful components, our trustful computing framework will provide an efficient, flexible and secure computing environment for embedded systems. BENEFIT: The proposed Trusted Computing Framework for Embedded Systems has tremendous applications potential in dynamic military applications. Given the GIG vision, such highly distributed embedded systems will be common and therefore secure, robust, efficient and timely information delivery is necessary. Security in embedded systems has been paid great interest in the last couple of years in different DoD agencies. The proposed trusted computing platform can be applied to various military networks for major programs like layered sensing program, surveillance network, Future Combat System (FCS), WIN-T etc. In addition, due to the increasing popularity of ubiquitous computing, our proposed solution can be applied into a large number of commercial embedded system applications, such as industrial control networks, border monitoring networks, and homeland security applications.