Trusted integrity measurement and reporting for virtualized platforms: (Work-in-progress)

Abstract

Verifiable trust is a desirable property for computing platforms. Current trusted computing systems developed by Trusted Computing Group (TCG) provide verifiable trust by taking immutable snapshots of the whole set of platform components. It is, however, difficult to use this technology directly in virtualized platforms because of complexity and dynamic changes of platform components. In this paper, we introduce a novel integrity management solution based on a small Software-based Root of Trust for Measurement (SRTM) that provides a trusted link to the integrity measurement chain in the TCG technology. Our solution makes two principal contributions: The first is a key management method, by which a verifier can be convinced that the SRTM is a trusted delegatee of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The second is two integrity management services, which provides a novel dependency relation between platform components and enables reversible changes to measured components. This extended abstract of the paper focuses on the key management method and shows the high level idea of these two services. Details of the dependency relation, the reversible changes, and the Xen implementation may be found in the full version of the paper. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.