CubeOS: Design and Implementation of a General-Purpose TPCM Operating System

As the core component of Autonomous Trusted Computing (ATC) architecture, Trusted Platform Control Module (TPCM) constructs security monitoring processes on-demand through its own operating system, achieving dynamic collaboration of multiple security mechanisms. Herein, we designed a general-purpose TPCM operating system CubeOS, guided by four fundamental design principles. Based on abstract representations of security monitoring processes first proposed in this work, we designed a three-layered architecture for CubeOS, and defined standardized TPCM operating system interfaces, consisting of function APIs and configuration data interfaces. As the secure collaboration system, CubeOS provides trusted cryptographic services for the entire system. CubeOS provides standardized adaptation methods to interact with security mechanisms external to TPCM, thus enabling compatibility with diverse security mechanisms. Furthermore, a standardized scheme was proposed to facilitate collaboration among multiple security mechanisms. Additionally, the primary security threats to CubeOS were analyzed by Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). As an implementation of CubeOS, we developed cubeos-1.5 in an isolated and minimalistic manner in the Linux environment, evaluated the performance of cubeos-1.5 by conducting a series of performance tests, and enabled adaptation for cubeos-1.5 to external security mechanisms. In a data security assurance scenario, we demonstrated a verifying example of realizing security monitoring processes by employing cubeos-1.5. Our study shows that CubeOS can be served as a cross-platform general-purpose operating system across various TPCM platforms, and provides security assurance for data circulation and use in scenarios such as the industrial internet, trusted data spaces, and AI security applications.