Software and hardware certification techniques in a combined certification model

Certification has been proved as an essential mechanism for achieving different security properties in new systems. However, it has important advantages; among which we highlighted the increasing in users trust by means of attesting security properties, but it is important to consider that in most of cases the system that is subject of certification is considered to be monolithic, and this feature implies that existing certification schemes do not provide support for dynamic changes of components as required in Cloud Computing running systems. One issue that has special importance of current certification schemes is that these refer to a particular version of the product or system, which derives that changes in the system structure require a process of recertification. This paper presents a solution based on a combination of software certification and hardware-based certification techniques. As a key element in our model we make use of the Trusted Computing functionalities as secure element to provide mechanisms for the hardware certification part. Likewise, our main goal is bringing the gap existing between the software certification and the means for hardware certification, in order to provide a solution for the whole system certification using Trusted Computing technology.