Safe Passage for Passwords and Other Sensitive Data.

Abstract

The prevalence of malware such as keyloggers and screen scrapers has made the prospect of providing sensitive information via web pages disconcerting for security-conscious users. We present Bumpy, a system to exclude the legacy operating system and applications from the trusted computing base for sensitive input, without requiring a hypervisor or VMM. Bumpy allows the user to specify strings of input as sensitive when she enters them, and ensures that these inputs reach the desired endpoint in a protected state. The inputs are processed in an isolated code module on the user’s system, where they can be encrypted or otherwise processed for a remote webserver. We present a prototype implementation of Bumpy.