Improving Cyber Security
Improving Cyber Security
This chapter discusses some promising game-changing strategies for improving cyber security: enabling tailored trustworthy spaces, thwarting attackers with proactive moving target strategies, and rewarding responsible behavior in cyberspace with economic or other incentives. It provides some concrete examples to show that these strategies can be used in hardware design to significantly improve cyber security: by either using hardware to enhance the security provided by software, or improving the trustworthiness of the hardware itself. For example, the Bastion hardware-software architecture can be used to help software systems achieve tailored trustworthy spaces, while the Newcache architecture shows how to build more trustworthy hardware—in this case, secure caches that cannot be used to leak information to adversaries—by using a moving target defense in hardware design. These hardware feasibility examples demonstrate that it is possible to build new hardware features into future commodity processors to enhance cyber security.
Keywords: cyber security, Bastion hardware-software security architecture, hardware design, software, Newcache architecture, moving target defense