An analysis of the Intel 80/spl times/86 security architecture and implementations

An in depth analysis of the 80/spl times/86 processor families identifies architectural properties that may have unexpected, and undesirable, results in secure computer systems. In addition, reported implementation errors in some processor versions render them undesirable for secure systems because of potential security and reliability problems. We discuss the imbalance in scrutiny for hardware protection mechanisms relative to software, and why this imbalance is increasingly difficult to justify as hardware complexity increases. We illustrate this difficulty with examples of architectural subtleties and reported implementation errors.