Trust-Management, Intrusion-Tolerance, Accountability, and Reconstitution Architecture (TIARA)

Abstract : This report describes the Trust-management, Intrusion-tolerance, Accountability, and Reconstitution Architecture (TIARA) system, a broad design effort including novel computer architecture, operating system and application middleware. TIARA illustrates that a highly secure computer system can be designed without sacrificing performance. TIARA involves three major sub-efforts: A hardware security tagged architecture (STA) that tags each word of the computer's memory with metadata such as the data type and compartment of the data. The STA hardware enforces access rules controlling which principals are allowed to perform which operations on which data. This allows the construction of a novel Zero-kernel Operating System (ZKOS) that has no single all privileged kernel and that provides strong guarantees against penetration. Finally TIARA provides a level of application middleware that enforces architectural level constraints and maintains the provenance of application data. All common exploits are preventable by the TIARA architecture and this incurs only a minor increase in chip area.