The Effects of Architecture on Security, and Vice-versa

Tuesday January 27, 2004
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 pm

James Hendricks
Carnegie Mellon University

This talk will consider the effects computer architecture can have on security (the academic side) and the effects security has had on commercial architectures. On the academic side, I will discuss two papers: "Architectural Support for Copy and Tamper Resistant Software" (Lie et al, ASPLOS IX) and "AEGIS: Architecture for Tamper- Evident and Tamper-Resistant Processing" (Suh et al, ICS '03). On the commercial side, I will discuss the following commercial applications as they relate to computer hardware: tamper-resistant devices such as the IBM 4758; the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES); and Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB, formerly Palladium) along with the Trusted Computing Group.

My goal is to call to attention the impact of security on architecture and performance as well as factors that limit what architecture can do for security. This talk is not meant as an authoritative guide to Palladium, Lagrange, or encryption, and it is specifically not about the merits or discontents of Digital Rights Management.

James Hendricks is a second-year graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. He received his B.S. degree in EECS in 2002 from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie primarily in operating systems, especially the impact of security and architecture on operating systems. He is currently working on the Self-*Storage project.