Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Jonathan M. McCune, Adrian Perrig, Arvind Seshadri, Leendert van Doorn. "Turtles All The Way Down: Research Challenges in User-Based Attestation". Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec), August, 2007.

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.

Electronic downloads

• http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/group/pub/mccune_perrig_seshadri_vandoorn_hotsec07.pdf

• HTML

  Jonathan M. McCune, Adrian Perrig, Arvind Seshadri, Leendert
  van Doorn. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/286.html"
  >Turtles All The Way Down: Research Challenges in
  User-Based Attestation</a>, Proceedings of the
  Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec), August, 2007.

• Plain text

  Jonathan M. McCune, Adrian Perrig, Arvind Seshadri, Leendert
  van Doorn. "Turtles All The Way Down: Research
  Challenges in User-Based Attestation". Proceedings of
  the Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec), August,
  2007.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{McCunePerrigSeshadriDoorn07_TurtlesAllWayDownResearchChallengesInUserBasedAttestation,
      author = {Jonathan M. McCune and Adrian Perrig and Arvind
                Seshadri and Leendert van Doorn},
      title = {Turtles All The Way Down: Research Challenges in
                User-Based Attestation},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in
                Security (HotSec)},
      month = {August},
      year = {2007},
      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.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/286.html}
  }
  

Posted by Adrian Perrig on 10 Sep 2007.
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