Cpu-based measured boot
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsDaniel Nemiroff, Ben Furman
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A measured boot process for an electronic device includes taking a measurement of the early system start up instructions of the electronic device upon a reboot or start-up of the device. A representation of the measurement is stored in a trusted platform module of the electronic device prior to initialization of the trusted platform module. Access is granted to the representation of the measurement stored in the trusted platform module prior to initialization of the trusted platform module thereby enabling the representation of the measurement to serve as the core root of trust for measurement.
Claims30
An electronic device, comprising:
- a central processing unit, non-volatile memory accessible by the central processing unit, and early system start-up computer readable instructions stored in the non-volatile memory;
- and
- a trusted platform module having a control register, firmware, and a command buffer, communicatively coupled to the central processing unit, the trusted platform module further includes logic that grants the central processing unit access to the control register and command buffer before the trusted platform module is fully initialized.
An electronic device, comprising
- logic to take a measurement of at least a portion of early system start up computer readable instructions of the electronic device upon a reboot or start-up of the device;
- logic to store a representation of the measurement in a trusted platform module of the electronic device prior to initialization of the trusted platform module;
- and
- logic to grant access to the representation of the measurement stored in the trusted platform module prior to initialization of the trusted platform module to thereby enable the representation of the measurement to be utilized as the core root of trust for measurement.
A method for initializing virtual trusted platform module buffers in an electronic device, comprising:
- allocating a block dynamic random access memory of the electronic device for a plurality of virtual trusted platform module buffers, the number of virtual machine trusted platform module buffers being dependent at least in part upon the number of virtual machines a trusted platform module of the electronic device can support;
- initializing the trusted platform module with a base address and size of the memory block allocated to the virtual trusted platform module buffers;
- initializing a virtual machine manager of the electronic device with the base address and size of each virtual trusted platform module buffer within the allocated block of memory;
- and
- initializing the virtual machines.
A non-transitory, computer-readable medium comprising a plurality of instructions that, in response to being executed on a computing device, cause the computing device to:
- take a measurement of at least a portion of early system start up computer readable instructions of the electronic device upon a reboot or start-up of the device;
- and
- store a representation of the measurement in a trusted platform module of the electronic device prior to initialization of the trusted platform module;
- and
- grant access to the representation of the measurement stored in the trusted platform module prior to initialization of the trusted platform module to thereby enable the representation of the measurement to be utilized as the core root of trust for measurement.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.