Hardware Containers for Software Components: A Trusted Platform for COTS-Based Systems

Abstract--Much of modern software development consists of assembling together existing software components and writing the glue code that integrates them into a unified application. The term COTS-Based System (CBS) is often used to describe such applications, for which the components assembled are understood to be CommercialOff-The-Shelf (COTS) components written by a multitude of independent third parties. The manner of assembly in CBS includes full-source components that are integrated at compile-time, pure-binary libraries incorporated at loadtime, and plugins that are loaded into the application at execution time by the user. Because components have access to system resources, applications may crash due to faulty components or may be compromised by malicious components. In this paper, we ask the question: can hardware support the development and deployment of CBS by providing applications with a trusted platform for managing components and their interactions? We present an architec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Eugen Leontie, Gedare Bloom, Bhagirath Narahari, Rahul Simha, Joseph Zambreno
• Keywords: CSE 2009, Modern Software Development, Software Components, Term Cots-based System, Theoretical Computer Science