Architectures for Trusted Program Execution

Department of Computer Engineering & Science
School of Electrical Engineering , The University of Belgrade

Presents

Architectures for Trusted Program Execution

By

Aleksandar Milenkovic

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

The University of Alabama in Huntsville

Thursday, May 12, 2005

12:00 – 1:00 PM

ETF 61

ABSTRACT

With the exponential growth of the number of interconnected computing platforms, computer security becomes a critical issue. The utmost importance of computer security is further underscored by the increased complexity of high-end systems as well as the expected proliferation of diverse Internet-enabled, low-end embedded systems -- ranging from home appliances, cars, and sensor networks to personal health monitoring devices. As software continues to grow in size and complexity, so does the number of security vulnerabilities: According to the US-CERT Coordination Center , the number of vulnerabilities reported has grown from 171 in 1995 to 4,129 in 2002. One of the major security problems is the execution of unauthorized and potentially malicious code. This problem can be addressed at different levels, from more secure software and operating systems, down to solutions based on hardware support. The majority of the existing techniques tackle the problem of security flaws at the software level, lacking generality, often inducing prohibitive overhead in performance and cost, or generating a significant number of false alarms. On the other hand, a further increase in the number of transistors on a single chip will enable integrated hardware support for functions that were so far restricted to the software domain. Hardware-supported defense techniques have the potential to be more general and more efficient than solely software solutions.

This talk will present architectures for trusted program execution that rely on runtime verification of software integrity using instruction block signatures. Several implementations will be discussed as well as results of performance evaluation indicating that the proposed techniques introduce a negligible performance overhead and minimal additional complexity.

The talk will be concluded with a brief description of other research efforts in the LaCASA laboratory related to instruction and data address trace compression and wireless body area networks for health monitoring.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Aleksandar Milenkovic is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He currently directs the LaCASA Laboratory (Laboratory for Advanced Computer Architectures and Systems, http://www.ece.uah.edu/~lacasa/ ). Dr. Milenkovic''s research focuses on advanced architectures for the next generation of high-performance, cost-effective, and secure computing devices, low-power VLSI, reconfigurable computing, and embedded systems. Dr. Milenkovic received his Dipl. Ing., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering&Science from the University of Belgrade. He has published 13 journal papers, over 30 conference papers, and filed one US patent application. More information is available at http://www.ece.uah.edu/~milenka/