Soumyadeep Ghosh will present his Pre-FPO on Friday, January 15, 2016 at 3:30pm in CS 301. The members of his committee are David August (advisor), Andrew Appel and Aarti Gupta (readers), David Wentzlaff and Simha Sethumadhavan, Columbia University (non-readers). Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk title and abstract follow below: Title: Hardware Assurance with Pluggable Trust Architectures Abstract: Today, a user must take it on faith that their hardware and software providers have built a system which will not betray them to malicious actors. While significant research has been done on securing the software stack, these techniques all assume the presence of secure hardware. However, a number of factors such as incompleteness of techniques for verifying complex hardware designs, outsourcing and off-shoring of design and fabrication, and the incorporation of third-party components diminish confidence in the security of computer hardware. To address this problem, we propose a new architecture that allows users to select their own basis of trust in the system, independent of the device manufacturer. Trust is established via a pluggable and user-swappable hardware element called the Sentry. This pluggable-trust architecture isolates the effects of compromised hardware by allowing only the correctly executed results of signed software to be communicated externally. The basis of trust for the entire system is the Sentry, which acts as a gatekeeper and bridges the physical gap between the untrusted processor and any I/O device. The Sentry’s minimal effect on performance, the simplicity of its design, and its pluggability enable its production at an independent trusted fabrication plant. Its simplicity also makes the Sentry's verification tractable, giving the user choice in trust providers.