Bootstrapping Trust in Commodity Computers

Trusting a computer for a security-sensitive task (such as checking email or banking online) requires the user to know something about the computer's state. The authors examine research on securely capturing a computer's state, and consider the utility of this information both for improving security on the local computer (e.g., to convince the user that her computer is not infected with malware) and for communicating a remote computer's state (e.g., to enable the user to check that a web server will adequately protect her data).