US Patent 10574653 Secure posture assessment

A posture assessment system is provided that uses an application programming interface (“API”), integrated into a computing device operating system, to assess the posture of the computing device. The API provides temporarily heightened access to the operating system, and executes code provided by the posture assessment system. The code may cause performance of various operations on the computing device, such as generating encoded representations of operating system components, performing computationally-expensive functions to verify execution of the code, and the like. The output of these operations can be sent to the posture assessment system for verification.