This is a paper I wrote together with Thomas Fischer and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. It was presented at SPattern 2009 workshop in Linz. Several aspects of secure operating systems have been analyzed and described as security patterns. However, previous patterns do not cover explicitly the secure interaction of users with the user interface of applications. A secure user interface system has to provide a trusted path between the user and the application the user intends to use. The trusted path must be able to ensure integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted data, and must allow for the verification of the authenticity of the end points. Our paper presents a pattern for secure graphical user interface systems and evaluates its use in different implementations. This pattern shows how to fulfill the security requirements of a trusted path while preserving, in a policy-driven way, the flexibility that graphical user interfaces generally demand.
The central idea is to mediate all user input/output through a Secure User Interface (SUI) system, and to separate the content drawn by applications from what is actually displayed on the screen. The SUI controls solely the graphics rendering hardware and the input events from the user input devices (typically, keyboard and mouse). The picture shows the participating elements.
[Paper] [Slides]
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