Turtles All The Way Down: Research Challenges in User-Based Attestation

Abstract

Current trusted computing technologies allow computing devices to verify each other, but in a networked world, there is no reason to trust one computing device any more than another. Treating these devices as turtles, the user who seeks a trustworthy system from which to verify others quickly realizes that it's turtles all the way down because of the endless loop of trust dependencies. We need to provide the user with one initial turtle (the iTurtle) which is axiomatically trustworthy, thereby breaking the dependency loop. In this paper, we present some of the research challenges involved in designing and using such an iTurtle.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA520948

Entities

People

  • Adrian Perrig
  • Arvind Seshadri
  • Jonathan M. Mccune
  • Leendert Van Doorn

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Authentication
  • Commerce
  • Commodities
  • Computers
  • Computing Devices
  • Electronic Commerce
  • Information Operations
  • Mass Production
  • Mobile Phones
  • Platforms
  • Recovery
  • Security
  • Software Design
  • Standards
  • User Interface
  • Verification

Readers

  • Aquatic Ecology
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Systems Analysis and Design