Practical techniques for operating system attestation

Abstract

This paper describes three practical techniques for authenticating the code and other execution state of an operating system using the services of the TPM and a hypervisor. The techniques trade off detailed reporting of the OS code and configuration with the manageability and comprehensibility of reported configurations. Such trade-offs are essential because of the complexity and diversity of modern general purpose operating systems makes simple code authentication schemes using code hashes or certificates infeasible. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.