Magic Boxes, Boots, and
Cores: Hardware-based Cybersecurity

Sean W. Smith
Dartmouth College, USA
sws@cs.dartmouth.edu

Abstract
Securing computation persists in being a significant difficult unsolved problem in the world's information infrastructure. However, an inescapable fact of computation is that it must take place on computing hardware. Consequently, a promising approach to making this difficult problem easier is to change this basic hardware. From a security perspective, perhaps the conventional approach here is to build computational devices that somehow deserve to be trusted, and then to cleverly embed these in larger computational systems. However, an unconventional approach is also emerging: Fundamental changes to the computing architecture itself will make the security game different – and perhaps easier to win.

This talk will review the tools and techniques in this exciting new area and discuss some of the new technology emerging in both industry and academia.

Biography of the Presenter
Prof. Sean Smith has been working in information security – attacks and defenses for industry and government – since before there was a Web. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, he performed security reviews, designs, analyses, and briefings for a wide variety of public-sector clients. At IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he designed the security architecture for (and helped code and test) the IBM 4758 secure coprocessor, and then led the formal modelling and verification work that earned it the world's first FIPS 140-1 Level 4 security validation. In July 2000, Smith left IBM for Dartmouth, since he was convinced that the academic education and research environment is a better venue for changing the world. His current work, as PI of the Dartmouth PKI Lab, investigates how to build trustworthy systems in the real world.

Dr. Smith was educated at Princeton and CMU, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/

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