ABSTRACT
Certification of Trusted Systems (Prepared by the
University of North Carolina for the Naval Research
Laboratory under contract N00014-91-K-2032 (NRL
Technical Memorandum 5540:062A, February 12, 1996))
contains in entry 8, “Covert Channel Analysis,” a discussion
of channel capacity that concludes that the trend toward
faster systems in shared memory multiprocessors makes
fast covert channels much more likely. This conforms to
Moore’s Law (The termMoore’s Lawwas coined by Carver
Mead (ca. 1970) and is named after Gordon E. Moore
(a cofounder of Intel). He determined that the number of
transistor counts for the same component costs doubled
every 2 years. This proportional “law” has been generalized
to information processing advances. Although such dou-
bling cannot continue indefinitely, it has largely held to
date.) which portends serious consequences if we ignore
covert channel analysis.
