Towards multilaterally secure computing platforms—with open source and trusted computing

Abstract

We present a security architecture for a trustworthy open computing platform that aims at solving a variety of security problems of conventional platforms by an efficient migration of existing operating system components, a Security Software Layer (PERSEUS), and hardware functionalities offered by the Trusted Computing technology. The main goal is to provide multilateral security, e.g., protecting users' privacy while preventing violations of copyrights. Hence the proposed architecture includes a variety of security services such as secure booting, trusted GUI, secure installation/update, and trusted viewer. The design is flexible enough to support a wide range of hardware platforms, i.e., PC, PDA, and embedded systems. The proposed platform shall serve as a basis for implementing a variety of innovative business models and distributed applications with multilateral security.