Kevin Butler - associate professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida Corporate communication
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Be Who You Are: Establishing Host Identity in Local and Remote Systems In order to know whether data is trustworthy, a necessary prerequisite to trusting data is determining where it originated. This is still a surprisingly difficult problem. We will examine how how individual systems can be identified without the need for trusted hardware through the the nearly-ubiquitous USB interface, based on small variations in hardware and software stacks. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach against an active adversary attempting to spoof or relay USB commands to subvert identification. We will also examine how the certificate authority problem makes effective establishment of remote identity difficult, and discuss how to establish easy alternatives to traditional CA validation.
