A practical approach for updating an integrity-enforced operating system
Wojciech Ozga, Do Le Quoc, Christof Fetzer

TL;DR
This paper presents a practical method for updating integrity-enforced operating systems by using a trusted software repository that sanitizes packages with SGX, maintaining security without altering package processes.
Contribution
It introduces TSR, a secure proxy that sanitizes software packages using SGX, enabling safe OS updates without compromising integrity verification.
Findings
TSR supports 99.76% of Alpine Linux packages.
Sanitization overhead is approximately 1.18 times.
Repository size increases by 3.6%.
Abstract
Trusted computing defines how to securely measure, store, and verify the integrity of software controlling a computer. One of the major challenges that make them hard to be applied in practice is the issue with software updates. Specifically, an operating system update causes the integrity violation because it changes the well-known initial state trusted by remote verifiers, such as integrity monitoring systems. Consequently, the integrity monitoring of remote computers becomes unreliable due to the high amount of false positives. We address this problem by adding an extra level of indirection between the operating system and software repositories. We propose a trusted software repository (TSR), a secure proxy that overcomes the shortcomings of previous approaches by sanitizing software packages. Sanitization consists of modifying unsafe installation scripts and adding digital…
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