Abstract

Tamper-proof coprocessors for secure computing are poised to become a standard hardware feature on future computers. Such hardware provides the primitives necessary to support trustworthy computing applications, that is, applications that can provide strong guarantees about their run time behavior. Current operating systems, however, lack the architecture and abstractions required to support trustworthy computing. Traditional operating systems, whether monolithic or based on a microkernel architecture, rely on a large trusted computing base (TCB) that is error-prone, expensive to audit, and inherently difficult to trust. Current abstractions they provide do not support the newly emerging secure coprocessing hardware. The construction of trustworthy applications, whose run time properties can be queried, inspected and assured, remains ad hoc in the absence of general-purpose system abstractions for trusted computing.

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