The Importance of High Assurance Security in Pervasive Computing

This talk will focus on the benefits that high assurance security (EAL6 or higher) can provide to pervasive computing devices. High assurance security is essential to defeating the attacks of sophisticated penetrators, and must be combined with countermeasures to defeat a variety of physical attacks, including threats such as power analysis, RF leakage, and fault insertion. The argument will be supported with examples from IBM’s work on development of a high-assurance smart card operating system, but will also discuss issues for such devices as cell phones and PDAs. Difficulties encountered in the Common Criteria evaluation process are also presented.