Vivek’s Soapbox

I finally submitted my dissertation to the UC Irvine library on Friday. After my final defense, this was the last hurdle to jump, and I have now officially completed my doctorate.

Here’s my dissertation. (PDF, 3.5 MB)

To cut a long story short, here is my thesis:

Remote attestation, one of the core mechanisms of Trusted Computing, can be
performed in a way that:

• reasons expressively about program behavior and dynamic properties
• enables a flexible, graded notion of trust
• avoids intractable management problems at both the client and server end
• does not tie attestation to a specific executable binary

In short, remote attestation can attest program properties, rather than program
binaries. I call this semantic remote attestation.