What Do We Need to Know? Techniques for Recording Platform State

Abstract

In deciding whether to trust a platform, it is desirable to learn about its current state. In this section, we discuss why code identity is a crucial piece of platform state and how to measure it (Section 2.1). We then consider additional dynamic properties that may be of interest, e.g., whether the running code respects information-flow control (Section 2.2). Finally, we argue that establishing code identity is a more fundamental property than establishing any of the other dynamic properties discussed (Section 2.3). Unfortunately, the security offered by many of these techniques is still brittle, as we discuss in Section 12.