Safe Passage for Passwords and Other Sensitive Data^∗

The prevalence of malware such as keyloggers and screen scrapers has made the prospect of providing sensitive information via web pages disconcerting for security-conscious users. We present Bumpy, a system to exclude the legacy operating system and applications from the trusted computing base for sensitive input, without requiring a hypervisor or VMM. Bumpy allows the user to specify strings of input as sensitive when she enters them, and ensures that these inputs reach the desired endpoint in a protected state. The inputs are processed in an isolated code module on the user’s system, where they can be encrypted or otherwise processed for a remote webserver. We present a prototype implementation of Bumpy.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Reiter Computer Science