CHAPTER 7 ISP—Hardware Enforcement of Security Policies

The Inherently Secure Processor (ISP) is a new processor architecture that takes security seriously. ISP extends a conventional processor architecture with additional circuitry that applies security policies in lock step with the ordinary execution of application instructions. At a high level, the ISP computer architecture can be viewed as two interlinked processors executing two programs in lock step. The first program, which we call the application, is whatever program is running at the time (web browser, web server, control program for a physical device, etc.), including the operating system. The second program is the set of security policies that were securely installed when the system was powered on.