Roots of Trust

Abstract

Trust in any system needs a foundation or a root of trust. Here, we discuss the roots of trust that have been proposed or deployed. Typically, the root of trust is based on the secrecy of a private key that is embedded in hardware; the corresponding public key is certified by the hardware’s manufacturer. As we discuss, some systems further rely on a piece of code that must execute in the early boot process for their root of trust.We also discuss schemes where the root of trust is established by the properties of the physical hardware itself.