Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an architecture for Personal Computers (PC) to avoid BIOS alteration and unauthorized access to resources. This proposal is based on results obtained from study of most popular PC platforms security mechanisms. Authentication controls which are established in PC platform in order to grant operating system booting or BIOS integrity of code mechanism incorporated to secure and avoid executing disallowed code are quite easy to break. The architecture described in the present work (Advanced Secure Architecture - ASA) increase the overall information and system security since prevents an unauthorized platform booting and it provides procedures for BIOS code authentication. On the other hand, ASA overcomes the users' authentication challenge in a corporative environment as well as it offers a very flexible way to specify the Personal Computers Corporation set that a user is allowed to access.

REFERENCES

• 1: W. A. Arbaugh , D. J. Farber , J. M. Smith, A secure and reliable bootstrap architecture, Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.65, May 04-07, 1997
• 2: TCG Trusted Computing Group: "Trusted Computing Group". URL:https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/home
• 3: López, L., Dasilva, A., Hernández, V., González, D., de Frutos, E., López M.: "Propuesta de un Modelo de Bios Seguro".VIII Reunión Española sobre Criptología y Seguridad de la Información RECSI 2004. (pp 393--399)
• 4: Chi-Feng, L., Yan-Shun, K., Hsia-Ling, C., Chung-Huang, Y.: "Fast Implementation of AES Cryptographic Algorithms in Smart Cards". Security Technology, 2003. Proceedings, IEEE 37^th Annual 2003 International Carnahan Conference on (pp 573--579).
• 5: Daemen, J,. Rijmen, V.: "AES Proposal: Rijndael. Pseudorandom Number Generator". 1999 (pp 43).
• 6: Tischer, M.: "PC Interno". Editorial Marcombo-Data Becker. 1993.
• 7: KeyGhost SX External Plug Models. URL:http://www.keyghost.com/sx/products.htm
• 8: KeyGhost. The Hardware Keylogger. URL:http://www.keyghost.com/securekb.htm
• 9: Li Zhuang , Feng Zhou , J. D. Tygar, Keyboard acoustic emanations revisited, Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, November 07-11, 2005, Alexandria, VA, USA [doi>10.1145/1102120.1102169]
• 10: Shamir, A., Tromer, E: "Acoustic Cryptanalysis. On nosy people and noisy machines". RSA & MIT Computer Sciencie and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. 2004. URL:http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~tromer/acoustic

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
authentication and authorization, cryptographic models, secure architecture, security, security computing platforms