A framework to secure peripherals at runtime

Abstract

Secure hardware forms the foundation of a secure system. However, securing hardware devices remains an open research problem. In this paper, we present IOCheck, a framework to enhance the security of I/O devices at runtime. It leverages System Management Mode (SMM) to quickly check the integrity of I/O configurations and firmware. IOCheck is agnostic to the operating system. We use random-polling and event-driven approaches to switch into SMM. We implement a prototype of IOCheck and conduct extensive experiments on physical machines. Our experimental results show that IOCheck takes 10 milliseconds to check the integrity of a network card and a video card. Also, IOCheck introduces a low overhead on Windows and Linux platforms. We show that IOCheck achieves a faster switching time than the Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement approach. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.