[ci5er]

IBM's Citadel project and Doug Tygar's group at CMU researched crypto co-processors about 20 years ago. You can still find Bennet Yee's PhD thesis online. It and it's bibliographical references gave a pretty good overview of the lay-of-the-land at that time. You'd think that the theory might have progressed some since then, but theory doesn't progress as fast as a front-end development framework...

Bad memories of how touchy these babies were when they first came out:

  - http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/pciecc2/overview.shtml

EDIT: What the hell. Here's Bennet Yee's PhD thesis. So you don't have to convert it from PostScript. (That said - this is a nasty image scan - you might want to do that anyway!)

  - http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a281255.pdf

I don't think I'm going to be able dig around for the extant Usenix papers from that era on the topic right now.

[Cyph0n]

I read through Tygar and Yee's paper on secure boot during my research. Their work was very good to be frank. They foresaw most of the recent developments in TPM design, which I thought was quite impressive.

[ci5er]

Oh - cool. It wasn't clear to me from your top-level comment how far back you'd gone. Even though it's old, I still think it's pretty good, and thought you should be made aware if you weren't already. Good to see that you're "on it"!

[Cyph0n]

Thanks for mentioning it regardless! I guess you are bound to miss something when sifting through past work on a topic.