Autopilot - A High Assurance Host Monitor

One of the fundamental goals of computer security is to ensure the integrity of system resources. Because all user applications rely on the integrity of the kernel and core system utilities, the compromise of any one part of the system can result in a complete lack of reliability in the system as a whole. Particularly in the case of commodity operating systems, the ability to place assurance on the numerous and complex parts of the system is exceedingly difficult. The most important pieces of this complex system reside in the core of the kernel itself. While a variety of tools and architectures have been developed for the protection of commodity systems, all have a fundamental flaw -- they rely on some portion of kernel correctness to remain trustworthy themselves. In this effort, we will review hardware virtualization and Intel?s Active Management Technology to determine if they provide the same level of capability and assurance as an add-in board. Based on our analysis, we will select one of the technologies to port the Copilot software base to provide a low cost and high assurance hardware platform for host (kernel) monitoring.