Software Partitioning to Migrate Critical Software Components to Trusted Hardware

Despite the increased levels of application security offered by secure coprocessors, the barrier of entry into this realm has been prohibitively high for software developers. Coprocessors do not incorporate sufficient computational resources to host entire applications; therefore it is up to developers to refactor applications by hand in order to derive components that will be tailored to run on the trusted hardware. We propose to ease the transition of software, either in compiled or in source code form, onto secure coprocessor hardware by providing a suit of innovative tools that will automate the software partitioning process, as well as streamline the entire software production lifecycle for partitioned applications from development, to distribution, and finally to execution on client machines. “Secure Division(tm)”, our proposed toolset, will leverage a state-of-the-art program slicer to split software components in a manner guaranteed to be correct, provide high levels of security, and minimize performance penalties. We will include a secure runtime environment in our toolset that is specifically designed to allow dynamic execution of code on the trusted hardware without compromising its integrity.