Distributing Trust Verification to Increase Application Performance

The remote trust problem aims to address the issue of verifying the execution of a program running on an un-trusted host which communicates regularly with a trusted server. One proposed solution to this problem relies on a centralized scheme using assertions and replication to withhold usable services from a tampered client. We show how to extend such a scheme to a distributed trusted hardware such as tamper-resistant smartcards. We compared the performance and security of the proposed distributed system to the original centralized scheme on a case study. Our results indicate that, compared to a centralized scheme, our distributed trust scheme has dramatically lower network traffic, and smaller memory and computational requirements on the trusted server.