Patent ID: 11928216
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G  H

Claim 0:
1. A method for protecting an operating system (OS) disk of a host computing device without block encrypting the OS disk in entirety, comprising:
identifying a portion of the OS disk of the host computing device, the portion of the OS disk including one or more files that store configuration data associated with OS binaries executed on the host computing device;
encrypting, using an encryption key, only the portion of the OS disk;
sealing the encryption key to a trusted platform module (TPM) of the host computing device; and
booting the host computing device comprising:
attempting to unseal the encryption key by authenticating one or more of the OS binaries with the TPM;
when authenticating the one or more of the OS binaries is successful, completing boot of the host computing device by decrypting the portion of the OS disk using the encryption key to obtain the configuration data; and
when authenticating the one or more of the OS binaries is not successful, aborting boot of the host computing device.