IOCheck: A framework to enhance the security of I/O devices at runtime

Abstract

Securing hardware is the foundation for implementing a secure system. However, securing hardware devices remains an open research problem. In this paper, we present IOCheck, a framework to enhance the security of I/O devices at runtime. It leverages System Management Mode (SMM) to quickly check the integrity of I/O configurations and firmware. IOCheck does not rely on the operating system and is OS-agnostic. In our preliminary results, IOCheck takes 4 milliseconds to switch to SMM which introduces low performance overhead.