Trusted Computing: The COTS Perspective Series
A trusted computing system can ensure security at the potentially vulnerable entry points of system interfaces, yet this may compromise performance through design trade-offs that systems designers must recognize, understand, mitigate, and compensate for.
Systems development often involves several different engineering groups, and the team dealing with security isn’t necessarily the one responsible for project performance. The group concerned with security will identify which parts of the system need protecting to meet the program’s security plan. An entirely different team can dictate performance issues involving processor speed, compute power, memory, and I/O bandwidth – all of which affect system hardware. It’s not unusual for these disparate teams to be out of sync with each other. This affects trusted computing systems because decisions made about system security inevitably affect system performance.
In addition to performance implications, there are costs to consider. Designers may opt to build and test a system mockup to gauge the overhead that security will impose, but it’s important to understand the true cost of implementing trusted computing features, including the cost of additional development time and potential delays to market.
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- Performance and security trade-offs
- Cost and time to market implications
- I/O security protocols