The Trusted Execution Module: Commodity General-Purpose Trusted Computing

This paper introduces the Trusted Execution Module (TEM); a high-level specification for a commodity chip that can execute usersupplied procedures in a trusted environment. The TEM is capable of securely executing partially-encrypted procedures/closures expressing arbitrary computation. These closures can be generated by any (potentially untrusted) party who knows the TEM's public encryption key. Compared to a conventional smartcard, which is typically used by pre-programming a limited set of domain- or application- specific commands onto the smartcard, and compared to the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is limited to a fixed set of cryptographic functions that cannot be combined to provide general-purpose trusted computing, the TEM is significantly more flexible. Yet we present a working implementation using existing inexpensive Javacard smartcards that does not require any export-restricted technology. The TEM's design enables a new style of programming, which in turn ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CARDIS
• Authors: Victor Costan, Luis F. G. Sarmenta, Marten van Dijk, Srinivas Devadas
• Keywords: CARDIS 2008, Hardware, TEM's Public Encryption, Trusted Execution Module, Trusted Platform Module