Problem Statement

To provide integrity verification services, we first examine the meaning of system integrity, in general. We then describe a web server example system to identify the types of problems that must be solved to prove integrity to a remote system with a high degree of confidence. We show that the operating system lacks the context to provide the level of integrity measurement necessary, but with a hardware root of trust, the operating system can be a foundation of integrity measurement. Currently, we surmise that it is more appropriate for finding integrity bugs than full verification, but we aim to define an architecture that can eventually be extended to meet our measurement requirements.