Is your computing environment secure? Security problems with interrupt handling mechanisms

Abstract

In an open distributed system, resources must be shared among various users. Security is one of the major issues in designing such a system. When a computer system is connected to a network, it is very important to ensure that the computer has the ability to manage its local resources securely. In this position paper, we will demonstrate that current computer architectures do give malicious users ways to penetrate computer systems and hence access the system or other user's secrets which are supposed to be well protected. We also propose some possible solutions to counterattack such security threats either at hardware or software level. The impacts of such mechanisms to system hardware and software are also discussed.