TrustFound: Towards a formal foundation for model checking trusted computing platforms

Abstract

Trusted computing relies on formally verified trusted computing platforms to achieve high security assurance. In practice, however, new platforms are often proposed without a comprehensive formal evaluation and explicitly defined underlying assumptions. In this work, we propose TRUSTFOUND, a formal foundation and framework for model checking trusted computing platforms. TRUSTFOUND includes a logic for formally modeling platforms, a model of trusted computing techniques and a broad spectrum of threat models. It can be used to check platforms on security properties (e.g., confidentiality and attestability) and uncover the implicit assumptions that must be satisfied to guarantee the security properties. In our experiments, TRUSTFOUND is used to encode and model check two trusted platforms. It has identified a total of six implicit assumptions and two severe previously-unknown logic flaws from them.