Affiliations: George Mason University and TriCipher Inc., USA E-mail: sandhu@gmu.edu | George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA E-mail: xzhang6@gmu.edu | Intel System Research Center, Bangalore, India E-mail: kumar.ranganathan@intel.com | Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR, USA E-mail: michael.j.covington@intel.com
Note: [] Corresponding author. Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 4A4, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. Tel.: (703)993-1668. Fax: (703)993-1638. E-mail: sandhu@gmu.edu.
Abstract: It has been recognized for some time that software alone does not provide an adequate foundation for building a high-assurance trusted platform. The emergence of industry-standard trusted computing technologies promises a revolution in this respect by providing roots of trust upon which secure applications can be developed. These technologies offer a particularly attractive platform for security policy enforcement in general distributed systems. In this paper we propose a security framework to enforce access control policies with trusted computing, by following the recently proposed policy-enforcement-implementation (PEI) models. Our architecture is based on an abstract layer of trusted hardware which can be constructed with emerging trusted computing technologies. A trusted reference monitor (TRM) is introduced beyond the trusted hardware. By monitoring and verifying the integrity and properties of running applications in a platform using the functions of trusted computing, the TRM can enforce various policies on behalf of object owners. We further extend this platform-based architecture to support general user-based access control policies, cooperating with existing services for user identity and attributes, thus potentially supporting general access control models such as lattice-based, role-based, and usage-based access control policies.
