"A Big Step Towards Cybersecurity's Holy Grail"

A significant advancement towards a user-friendly computing environment, in which the guarantee of security is as strong as a mathematical proof, has been made by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab. They revealed a new provably secure computing environment that can protect users' communication with devices like the keyboard, mouse, or display, even if malicious hackers compromise operating systems and other applications. This secure environment will make malicious activities such as sniffing users' keystrokes, capturing screen output, and stealing or modifying data stored on user-pluggable devices, impossible. The researchers presented an I/O separation model that explains what it means to protect the communications of isolated applications running on commonly compromised operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. According to the team, their I/O separation model is the first mathematically proven model to achieve communication separation for all kinds of I/O hardware and I/O kernels, which are the programs aiding interactions between software and hardware components. This type of secure environment has become more important than ever, as workers increasingly utilize Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs) to operate remote desktops. CyLab's Virgil Gligor, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and a co-author of the work, says that business, government, and industry can benefit from this platform and its VDI application because of the shift to remote work and the need to protect sensitive applications from attacks. This article continues to discuss the capabilities, potential benefits, and applications of the new provably secure computing platform presented by CyLab researchers. 

CyLab reports "A Big Step Towards Cybersecurity's Holy Grail"