A software-based root-of-trust primitive on multicore platforms

Yan, Qiang; Han, Jin Woo; Li, Yingjiu; Deng, Robert H.; Li, Tieyan

doi:10.1145/1966913.1966957

Cited by 13 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…There are several techniques for remote trust establishment [12], [19], [20], [22], [36] with underlying platforms range from Web servers to embedded systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A minimalist approach to Remote Attestation

Francillon

Nguyen

Rasmussen

et al. 2014

Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE), 2014

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Embedded computing devices increasingly permeate many aspects of modern life: from medical to automotive, from building and factory automation to weapons, from critical infrastructures to home entertainment. Despite their specialized nature as well as limited resources and connectivity, these devices are now becoming an increasingly popular and attractive target for attacks, especially, malware infections. A number of approaches have been suggested to detect and/or mitigate such attacks. They vary greatly in terms of application generality and underlying assumptions. However, one common theme is the need for Remote Attestation, a distinct security service that allows a trusted party (verifier) to check the internal state of a remote untrusted embedded device (prover). Many prior methods assume some form of trusted hardware on the prover, which is not a good option for small and low-end embedded devices. To this end, we investigate the feasibility of Remote Attestation without trusted hardware. This paper provides a systematic treatment of Remote Attestation, starting with a precise definition of the desired service and proceeding to its systematic deconstruction into necessary and sufficient properties. Next, these are mapped into a minimal collection of hardware and software components that result in secure Remote Attestation. One distinguishing feature of this line of research is the need to prove (or, at least argue for) architectural minimality-an aspect rarely encountered in security research. This work also provides a promising platform for attaining more advanced security services and guarantees.

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“…There are several techniques for remote trust establishment [12], [19], [20], [22], [36] with underlying platforms range from Web servers to embedded systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A minimalist approach to Remote Attestation

Francillon

Nguyen

Rasmussen

et al. 2014

Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE), 2014

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“…Despite this specifity, SobTrA provides the basis for an implementation on other ARM cores. For multi-core processors SobTrA could be combined with the generic approach by Yan et al [19]. The ARMv7-A architecture has some specialties which must rand ← rand + (rand 2 ∨ 5) mod 2 32 7:…”

Section: Cortex-a8 Checksum Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SobTrA

Horsch

Wessel

Stumpf

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy

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In this paper, we present SobTrA, a Software-based Trust Anchor for ARM Cortex-A processors to protect systems against software-based attacks. SobTrA enables the implementation of a software-based secure boot controlled by a third party independent from the manufacturer. Compared to hardware-based trust anchors, our concept provides some other advantages like being updateable and also usable on legacy hardware. The presented software-based trust anchor involves a trusted third party device, the verifier, locally connected to the untrusted device, e.g., via the microSD card slot of a smartphone. The verifier is verifying the integrity of the untrusted device by making sure that a piece of code is executed untampered on it using a timing-based approach. This code can then act as an anchor for a chain of trust similar to a hardware-based secure boot. Tests on our prototype showed that tampered and untampered execution of SobTrA can be clearly and reliably distinguished.

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“…Only during measurement the attacker points a virtual memory address to clean physical memory, and when not measured the virtual address points to attackermodified physical memory. Yan et al [28] also recently proposed an attack which exploits pipeline parallelism, and suggested a countermeasure of introducing backwards data dependency within checksum loops. This is an easy condition to achieve, and will be added to our implementation.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Results for Timing-Based Attestation

Kovah

Kallenberg

Weathers

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

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In this paper we present a comprehensive timingbased attestation system suitable for typical enterprise use, and evidence of that system's performance. This system, similar to Pioneer [20] but built with relaxed assumptions, successfully detects attacks on code integrity over 10 links of an enterprise network, despite an average of just 1.7% time overhead for the attacker. We also present the first implementation and evaluation of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware timing-based attestation protocol. We describe the design and results of a set of experiments showing the effectiveness of our timing-based system, thereby providing further evidence of the practicality of timing-based attestation in real-world settings. While system measurement itself is a worthwhile goal, and timing-based attestation systems can provide measurements that are equally as trustworthy as hardware-based attestation systems, we feel that Time Of Check, Time Of Use (TOCTOU) attacks have not received appropriate attention in the literature. To address this topic, we present the three conditions required to execute such an attack, and how past attacks and defenses relate to these conditions.

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A software-based root-of-trust primitive on multicore platforms

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

A minimalist approach to Remote Attestation

A minimalist approach to Remote Attestation

SobTrA

New Results for Timing-Based Attestation

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