E-BOOT: Preventing Boot-Time Entropy Starvation in Cloud Systems

Boot Camp for Cognitive Systems

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has implemented a program to build the first instance of a complete cognitive agent. The program, called Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL), is expected to yield new cognitive technology of significant value not only to the military, but also to the business and academic sectors. (Gunning 2004) With traditional engineering projects, ev...

Putting the Boot in

Two of the happiest days of my life have been ruined by inappropriate footwear. The first time was on my honeymoon. Not in bed, I hasten to add. We Northerners admit to being sewn into our woolly vests from November to March, come what may, but when it comes to amorous dalliance we always remove our boots, and often our socks, weather permitting. The honeymoon in question was spent in the Austr...

Attacking the BitLocker Boot Process

We discuss five attack strategies against BitLocker, which target the way BitLocker is using the TPM sealing mechanism. BitLocker is a disk encryption feature included in some versions of Microsoft Windows. It represents a state-of-the-art design, enhanced with TPM support for improved security. We show that, under certain assumptions, a dedicated attacker can circumvent the protection and brea...

Delusional Boot: Securing Cloud Hypervisors without Massive Re-engineering

The set of virtual devices offered by a hypervisor to its guest VMs is a virtualization component ripe with security exploits – more than half of all vulnerabilities of today’s hypervisors are found in this codebase. This paper presents Min-V, a hypervisor that disables all virtual devices not critical to running VMs in the cloud. Of the remaining devices, Min-V takes a step further and elimina...

Configuring Boot Disks