Semantic remote attestation: a virtual machine directed approach to trusted computing

Remote attestation is one of the core functionalities provided by trusted computing platforms. It holds the promise of enabling a variety of novel applications. However, current techniques for remote attestation are static, inexpressive and fundamentally incompatible with today's heterogeneous distributed computing environments and commodity open systems. Using language-based virtual machines enables the remote attestation of complex, dynamic, and high-level program properties - in a platform-independent way. We call this semantic remote attestation. This enables a number of novel applications that distribute trust dynamically. We have implemented a prototype framework for semantic remote attestation, and present two example applications built on it - a peer-to-peer network protocol, and a distributed computing application.