A Secure and Reliable Platform Conguration Change Reporting Mechanism for Trusted Computing Enhanced Secure Channels

摘要

The security of well established secure channel technologies like transport layer security (TLS) or IP security (IPSec) can be signi.cantly improved by emerging concepts like Trusted Computing. The use of trusted platform modules (TPMs) offers new methods for improving the security of these well established technologies. How secure channel technologies can be adapted to use trusted computing concepts is subject to current research. A major part of this research addresses the integration of the TCG's speci.ed remote attestation. Remote attestation enables a platform to provide a trustworthy proof of its current con.guration (i.e. software that has been loaded on the platform). Hence, based on this proof, a remote platform can decide whether to open a channel to another platform or not. In current approaches, the proof of the platform con.guration is processed before a secure channel is established, which is not opened if the reported con.guration is not accepted by the hosts. However, one important problem has not been solved yet. Currently, no satisfying solution how the change of a platform's con.guration can be securely and reliably reported to the remote platform whilst a channel is open, exists. A reliable method to provide a proof for a con.guration change can be implemented with only minor modi.cations of the TPM speci.cation and the TLS protocol. Experimental results show that it is possible to implement this proof mechanism with only a few additional TPM commands.