Options for securing PCs against phishing and espionage: A report from the EU-project open trusted computing

Abstract

Private and business PC users will continue to experience attacks from viruses and Trojan horses. The latter might, e.g., eavesdrop on banking passwords or send confidential business data to a criminal. It is very difficult to provide protection from such attacks on private information within the current operating systems. Novel approaches to securing such data outside the user's main operating system, using virtualization techniques are presented here. The transparency and trustworthiness of such approaches are, however, by no means guaranteed. In order to protect users, the development of such approaches could be monitored and influenced at the political level, e.g. by governments procuring such systems. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.