Dynamic Secure Virtualization Co-Processor

Software critical to National Security and essential to a corporation’s survival can be exploited through reverse engineering and unauthorized access. Without innovative protection initiatives, these vulnerabilities can be leveraged to distribute programs or critical information without proper authority. One of the best methods to prevent such malicious attack is to maintain critical elements of the program and data encrypted, even when it is being used, with specialized hardware. However, this can come with undesired side effects such as increased cost, processor dependency, and the break-one, break often syndrome. One way to overcome these limitations is to incorporate a virtual machine, an executing operating system that is encapsulated into a single process thread, into the solution. Given the recent support that major hardware companies have given to virtualization, including Intel’s 64-bit Dual-core and the AMD’s AMD64 processors, this can now be implemented with performance at or near native speed. Through the use of a dynamic secure virtualization co-processor and an innovative processing algorithm, Pikewerks plans to prototype a cost-effective system that will suffer minimal, if any, performance degradation and allow the software protection scheme to run on a multitude of hosts.