TRUSTED ILLIAC: A Configurable Hardware Framework for a Trusted Computing Base

Summary form only given. Trusted ILLIAC is a reliable and secure computing platform being built at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and Information Trust Institute (ITI), involving faculty from Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments. The end goal is a large, demonstrably trustworthy enterprise-class computing system to support, what is variously referred to as on-demand/utility computing or adaptive enterprise-computing Such systems require that a significant number of applications co-exist and share hardware/software resources using a variety of containment boundaries. Current solutions aim at providing hardware and software solutions that can only be described as one-size-fits-all approaches. Today´s cyber-infrastructures are complex, expensive to implement, and nearly impossible to validate The challenge is to provide an application-specific level of reliability and security in a totally transparent manner, while delivering optimal performance. A promising approach lies in developing a new set of methods that provide customized levels of trust (specified by the application) enforced in hardware, using an integrated approach involving reprogrammable hardware, enhanced compiler methods to extract security and reliability properties;. Our approach is to demonstrate such a set of integrated techniques that span entire system hierarchy: processor hardware, operating system, and application. This talk will describe the current status, the prototype hardware and software and on-going plans. Trusted ILLIAC is based on research and support provided by, among others, The National Science Foundation, MARCO/GSRC (SRC and DARPA), IBM, HP, AT&T, AMD, Intel, Motorola, XILINX, and the State of Illinois.