There are a lot of presentations and suggestions that indicate HSMs, TrustZone, AMT, TrEE, SecureBoot, Attestation, TPMs, IOMMU, DRTM, etc. are silver bullets. What does it all mean, should we be afraid, excited, hopeful? Hardware-based security features are not the end of the world, nor its savior, but they can be fun and useful. Although these technologies are vulnerability research targets, their trust concepts can be used to build secure software and devices.
This primer covers practical defensive uses of existing and upcoming hardware security and mobile trust technologies. We will overview the strengths, pitfalls, gotchas of these esoteric acronyms; and explain the capabilities of related features built into consumer and enterprise laptops, mobile, and embedded devices. Let’s take a tour around the wild world of hardware and trust security!