Patent ID: 7260848

Claim:
A method comprising: defining a resource access policy that defines rules to allow or disallow access to a designated system resource; determining a security status of a firmware-based event handler; and allowing access to the designated system resource in response to a corresponding access request during execution of the firmware-based event handler based on the security status of the firmware-based event handler and the resource access policy, wherein the resource access policy corresponds to a memory access policy that prevents access to non-trusted event handlers from accessing memory allocated to trusted code and an input/output (I/O) port access policy that prevents access to a computer system's I/O port if an I/O port event handler is non-secure, the memory access policy uses a memory paging mechanism that includes a plurality of page table entries, each defining a security status of a memory page to which the page table entry corresponds, and the memory paging mechanism is hardware-based, and the processor automatically generates a code fault in response to an attempt to access a memory location, and in response to a code fault performing the operations of, determining a security status of a memory page corresponding to the memory access request; and determining whether the memory access request should be allowed based on a combination of the security status of the memory page and the security status of the firmware-based event handler as defined by the memory access policy.