Bonsai Merkle Tree Streams: Bulk Memory Verification Unit for Trusted Program Verification System

Author

Richard J. Rios, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis ObispoFollow

Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2946

Date of Award

12-2024

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Department/Program

Computer Science

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Stephen Beard

Advisor Department

Computer Science

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

Today, all modern computing systems are undoubtedly vulnerable to numerous types of attacks that could be targeted toward any layer of the system from dedicated hardware to highly abstracted software. Unfortunately, many devices and systems naturally contain inadequately protected components or software modules that un- dermine their security as a whole. Additionally, security is heavily variable system to system, and has a huge dependence on adequate implementation and ongoing support from device and software manufacturers. To address these various security issues in a very general way, TrustGuard, a containment security system utilizing an external device called the Sentry that would verify the activity of the host machine and control all incoming/outgoing communication accordingly, was created. To do this, Trust- Guard uses cryptographic memory protection schemes, a small trusted hardware and software base, and recomputation and checking of application behavior running on the host machine at an instruction-by-instruction granularity before allowing exter- nal communication to occur. Currently, however, the TrustGuard system only allows for one 8-byte chunk to be sent or received externally at one time, limiting overall throughput, and heavily polluting the main system caches in the case of large data transfers. To combat this limitation, This thesis proposes a system to allow for ef- ficient communication of large batches of data at once. In particular, it does so by using a small dedicated cache and efficient tree traversal techniques to asynchronously verify large chunks of program memory in stream-like fashion. This thesis primarily serves to provide a design, proof-of-concept, and collection of important information that will help future students implement such a system.