Establishing Trust Boundaries Between Black Wall and Hardware

Problem statement

Investigate how Black Wall can evaluate hardware trust, isolate peripherals, and reduce risks associated with compromised firmware or unauthorized device access.

Why it matters

The operating system cannot secure what the hardware silently controls. Firmware and peripherals sit below the kernel's usual visibility, so their trust assumptions have to be made explicit before device access can be constrained.

Research questions

1. 01 Which hardware components must be trusted, and what evidence supports that trust on each supported platform?
2. 02 What TPM-backed measurements are available, and which trust decisions can reliably depend on them?
3. 03 Which devices can be isolated with an IOMMU, and what are the gaps when it is unavailable?
4. 04 How should device and driver privileges be restricted without making supported hardware unusable?

Research objectives

• Define hardware trust assumptions.
• Investigate TPM-backed measurements where available.
• Evaluate IOMMU-based isolation for supported devices.
• Restrict device and driver privileges.
• Document hardware-specific limitations.

Technical challenges

• IOMMU availability, granularity and behaviour differ across platforms and virtual machines.
• Device firmware is often opaque and may not expose measurements the OS can verify.
• Drivers need enough privilege to operate hardware yet should not inherit unrestricted memory access.
• Trust assumptions that hold in a VM may not hold on physical hardware.

Expected outcome

A hardware trust model and a prototype device-security policy framework.

Tags

hardware trusttpmiommudevice isolationfirmwaredrivers

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