Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Magic boxes and boots: security in hardware

2004; IEEE Computer Society; Volume: 37; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1109/mc.2004.170

1558-0814

Sean W. Smith,

Security and Verification in Computing

Computer users tend to think of computation - even the globally distributed computation that constitutes the Internet - in terms of what we see: the browser user interface, the text editor, the Gnome or OS X or Windows desktop. Similarly, we tend to think of computer security problems solely in terms of what users see: the application software, perhaps the OS underneath it, or perhaps even the "end to end" environment from one application installation to another. We discuss how hardware can be used to change the security game. From a security perspective, the first idea that comes to mind is to add a "magic box" to the computer - one that can hide secrets and computation even from an adversary with direct physical access.