Automated Recovery in a Secure Bootstrap Process

Published: Apr 12, 2000
Updated: Apr 12, 2000
Section: Network Security Library :: Software Engineering
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Integrity is rarely a valid presupposition in many systems architectures, yet it is necessary to make any security guarantees. To address this problem, we have designed a secure bootstrap process, AEGIS, which presumes a minimal amount of integrity, and which we have prototyped on the Intel x86 architecture. The basic principle is sequencing the bootstrap process as a chain of progressively higher levels of abstraction, and requiring each layer to check a digital signature of the next layer before control is passed to it.

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