Computing Under Occupation

ABSTRACT

Recent investigations have found a massively increasing professionalisation and organization of attacks executed on con- sumer computing systems. Simultaneously, the systems we are trying to defend are getting more and more complex and networked, while promising security technologies—such as trusted boot and strong process isolation—appear to have troubles finding their way into mainstream devices.

This leads us to the conclusion that we may be forced to accept that the security war is lost for now, and that a considerable portion of all consumer PCs is under control of some organized malicious entity. In this work, we investigate the options left to the defenders in this scenario: Assuming that PC World is under control of a hostile force, how can we (a) survive (i.e., work) in a meaningful way, and (b) destroy the economic value for the attacker without severely damaging our own resources.