Abstract

As a prelude to the clean-slate design for the SecureCore project, the fundamental security principles from more than four decades of research and development in information security technology were reviewed. As a result of advancing technology, some of the early principles required re-examination. For example, previous worked examples of combinations of hardware, and software may have encountered problems of performance and extensibility, which may no longer exist in today's environment. Moore's law in combination with other advances has yielded better performance processors, memory and context switching mechanisms. Secure systems design approaches to networking and communication are beginning to emerge and new technologies in hardware-assisted trusted platform development and processor virtualization open hither to previously unavailable possibilities. The results of this analysis have been distilled into a review of the principles that underlie the design and implementation of trustworthy systems.

Date

March 14, 2026

Authors

Terry V Benzel, Cynthia E Irvine, Timothy E Levin, Thuy D Nguyen, Paul C Clark, Ganesha Bhaskare

Publisher

Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School