A Vendor-Agnostic Root of Trust for Measurement

We report the success of a project that Google performed as a proof-of-concept for increasing confidence in first-instruction integrity across a variety of server and peripheral environments. We begin by motivating the problem of first-instruction integrity and share the lessons learned from our proof-of-concept implementation. Our goal in sharing this information is to increase industry support and engagement for similar designs. Notable features include a vendor-agnostic capability to interpose on the SPI peripheral bus (from which bootstrap firmware is loaded upon power-on in a wide variety of devices today) without negatively impacting the efficacy of any existing vendor- or device-specific integrity mechanisms, thereby providing additional defense-in-depth.

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