Patent ID: 8112798

Claim:
In a computing environment, a computing system comprising: a processor; a memory; a software operating system; an independent computation environment contained at least in part in a set of one or more hardware components, wherein the independent computation environment comprises a trusted external processing environment that is physically separate and isolated from the software operating system, the memory, the processor and a storage device on which the operating system is stored, wherein the trusted external processing environment implements the trusted external processing environment to prevent tampering by users, tampering by the operating system and tampering by other software functions, wherein the trusted external processing environment comprises an external root of trust that is independent of the operating system and that is trusted to access software code on the storage device on which the operating system is stored and measure the health of various software code sets stored on the storage device, wherein the health measurement provides an indication of the current operating status of the software code set and wherein the health measurement includes evaluating one or more memory locations and placing a re-read trigger upon changes that occur during a reading operation which is part of the memory evaluation such that memory locations that were already read cannot be changed behind the memory location currently being read, the memory evaluation being executed on a redetermined, periodic basis according to a predefined policy; and hosted logic of the independent computation environment that measures the health of at least one set of software code that is in memory to cause an action if the set of software code is measured to be unhealthy according to policy data, wherein upon determining that the measured software code set is unhealthy, the software code set is operated in a reduced-performance mode that reduces the utility of the software code set.