Secure Platforms and Trusted Components
Build justified trust from small enforcement components, hardened runtimes, boot evidence, isolation, and controlled information flow.
Topic index
Platform and Component Security
Learn how trusted bases, isolation, boot integrity, attestation, information flow, and shared hardware shape system security.
Topic index
Understand this domain
Pomerium coverage
Pomerium can protect administrative and application routes and can use identity and device evidence in access policy. Operators still own the hosts, kernels, hypervisors, firmware, boot chain, runtime isolation, platform attestation, and information-flow controls below and around those routes.
Limits
- A component is trusted when its failure can break a security property, not because it has been tested or comes from a trusted vendor.
- Isolation and attestation state a bounded claim about a defined layer. They do not prove that an application is correct or that every lower layer is uncompromised.
- Shared processors, caches, devices, management planes, and recovery systems can connect workloads that appear separate in an architecture diagram.
Primary sources
1 learning path
Paths for this topic
5 related guides
Guides in this topic
Analyze Side-Channel and Shared-Resource Risk
Model secret-dependent signals and deliberate covert channels across software, shared hardware, protocols, and physical devices.
Design Information Flow Controls
Define labels, allowed flows, trusted transformations, release policy, evidence, and residual channels across an application and its data systems.
Design Secure Boot and Platform Attestation
Connect roots of trust, boot verification, measurements, fresh evidence, appraisal, policy, update, revocation, and recovery.
Harden a Security-Sensitive Service
Build, deploy, verify, update, and recover a role-specific minimal service without broad host or control-plane authority.
Minimize a Trusted Computing Base
Derive the real trusted set for one security claim, remove accidental trust, and build evidence for every remaining assumption.
15 related terms
Concepts in this topic
Covert Channel
Find unintended communication paths that let cooperating subjects transfer information through shared storage, timing, load, errors, or resource state.
Execution Isolation and Sandboxing
Bound untrusted code with explicit memory, process, file, network, device, syscall, identity, and resource controls.
Fault Injection and Tamper Resistance
Model physical and logical faults that skip checks, corrupt state, expose keys, or force unsafe recovery in a security component.
Formal Methods and Security Models
Use precise models, invariants, and proofs to answer a bounded security question without confusing the model with the deployed system.
Hardware Root of Trust
Anchor a narrow security function in protected hardware while stating the manufacturing, firmware, key, lifecycle, and physical assumptions that remain.
Inference Attack
Derive protected facts from permitted queries, aggregates, models, correlations, errors, and repeated observations.
Information Flow Control
Control where information may move after access by tracking source, destination, transformation, label, release, and declassification.
Multilevel Security
Enforce mandatory policy when one system processes information and users at different sensitivity and clearance levels.
Platform Attestation
Appraise fresh signed evidence about a platform through explicit attester, verifier, reference-value, policy, and relying-party roles.
Privilege Separation
Split a service into components with different authority so compromise of one parser or workflow does not grant the complete service privilege.
Secure Boot and Measured Boot
Distinguish code authorization before execution from recorded boot measurements used for later appraisal and recovery.
Security Kernel
Understand the small privileged mechanism that implements a reference monitor and controls access to system resources.
Side-Channel Attack
Analyze information leaked through time, caches, memory access, power, emissions, sound, faults, resources, and error behavior.
System Hardening
Reduce a deployed system to required services, identities, interfaces, privileges, configurations, and recovery paths, then keep it there.
Trusted Computing Base
Identify every component whose correct behavior is necessary for a stated security property, then reduce and verify that trusted set.
