Abstract
In today's Internet computing world, illegal activities by crackers pose a serious threat to computer security. It is well known that computer viruses, Trojan horses and other intrusive programs may cause severe and often catastrophic consequences.
This paper proposes a novel secure computer architecture based on security-code. Every instruction/data word is added with a security-code denoting its security level. External programs and data are automatically added with security-code by hardware when entering a computer system. Instruction with lower security-code cannot run or process instruction/data with higher security level. Security-code cannot be modified by normal instruction. With minor hardware overhead, the new architecture can effectively protect the main computer system from destruction or theft by intrusive programs such as computer viruses. For most PC systems, it includes an increase of word-length by 1 bit on registers, the memory and the hard disk.
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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.60083008).
GAO Qingshi received his B.S. degree in mathematics from Beijing University in 1957, and was elected an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. He was one of the chief computer architecture designers for the China's first large-scale general-purpose vacuum tube and transistor computers in 1958–1959, and was in charge of the computer architecture design for the large-scale computer 109(C) and China's first vector supercomputer in 1963 and 1974. He has published more than 70 papers in sciences in Journal of Computer, international conferences, etc. His current research interests include parallel algorithms, computer architecture, natural language & machine translation, human intelligence and network security.
HU Yue received her B.S. degree in computer science and engineering from Taiyuan University of Technology in 1986, and has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Taiyuan University of Technology from 1992, and received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Science & Technology Beijing in 1996 and 2000, respectively. She has published papers in sciences in Journal of Computer, etc. Her current research interests include parallel algorithms, natural language & machine translation and network security.
LI Lei received his B.S. degree in computer science from Xidian University in 2000, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Computing Technology of The Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include computer architecture and network security.
CHEN Xu received his B.S. degree in science English from University of Science and Technology Beijing in 1995, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the University. His current research interests include natural language & machine translation and network security.
LIU Honglan received her B.S. degree in computer science from University of Science and Technology Beijing in 1995, and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science of the university. Her current research interests include parallel algorithms and network security.
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Gao, Q., Hu, Y., Li, L. et al. A novel computer architecture to prevent destruction by viruses. J. of Comput. Sci. & Technol. 17, 241–248 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02947303
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02947303