Joanna Rutkowska

Title: Thoughts about Trusted Computing

Bio:
Joanna Rutkowska, founder of Invisible Things Lab, leads a team of researchers that focus on system-level security issues. This includes kernel, hypervisor, chipset and CPU security issues, including all the new technologies like TPM, VT/AMD-v, and TXT. The recent achievements of the team include: bypassing Intel TXT, attacks on SMM, and demonstration of practical Xen hypervisor compromises. She is also known for writing Blue Pill — a virtualization-based rootkit with nested Matrices^Whypervisors support, and also for her work on various kernel mode malware for Windows and Linux.

Abstract:
What the heck is this Trusted Computing thing that everybody’s taking about? And should I be afraid of it? Everybody says I won’t be able to run Linux and download free movies anymore?! Does TC offer any benefits for *users*?

To answer those questions we take a look at the basic building blocks for Trusted Computing: TPM, VT, and TXT technologies (technologies that are available on majority of the new hardware that we can buy in shops these days).

We then discuss scenarios where those new technologies can really be useful for us, users, but also show examples of security problems that cannot be solved by those technologies (e.g. runtime attacks on hypervisors).

Finally we stress the distinction between what the technology theoretically *promises* vs. what it actually *provides*, by pointing out to recent research on attacking TPM and TXT.