Rapid trust establishment for pervasive personal computing

Trust-Sniffer's staged approach to establishing confidence in untrusted machines balances security and ease-of-use, facilitating rapid use of transient hardware. Trust-Sniffer is a tool that helps users to gain confidence in an initially untrusted machine and focuses on software attacks. Trust-Sniffer's staged approach to establishing confidence in an untrusted machine balances the needs for security, usability, and speed. Trust-Sniffer aims to enhance security with modest user effort. Most of a user's execution environment is fetched from a trusted server over an authenticated, encrypted channel that includes the guest operating system and applications that execute inside the user's virtual machine. The approach is accomplished in three stages, including establishment of a root of trust, booting the on-disk operating system, and validating other local software on trust faults.