An architecture for supervising COTS products

Commercial off-the-shelf products (COTS) are now dominating the consumer market as well as specific applications, e.g., new military equipment. Since almost no control of the manufacturing is possible, backdoors to both, hard- and software, can be introduced easily with little chance of being detected by current detection approaches. Due to the irreversible dependency from COTS products and marginal possibilities for a medium term improvement, new techniques are necessary to discover COTS manipulations (e.g., data leakage and malicious COTS devices). Therefore, this publication contains first results of a new architecture for supervising COTS products which is currently under development.