Open-TEE - An Open Virtual Trusted Execution Environment

Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are widely deployed in mobile devices. Yet their use has been limited primarily to applications developed by the device vendors. Recent standardization of TEE interfaces by GlobalPlatform (GP) promises to partially address this problem by enabling GP-compliant trusted applications to run on TEEs from different vendors. Nevertheless ordinary developers wishing to develop trusted applications face significant challenges. Access to hardware TEE interfaces are difficult to obtain without support from vendors. Tools and software needed to develop and debug trusted applications may be expensive or non-existent. In this paper, we describe Open-TEE, a virtual, hardware-independent TEE implemented in software. Open-TEE conforms to GP specifications. It allows developers to develop and debug trusted applications with the same tools they use for developing software in general. Once a trusted application is fully debugged, it can be compiled for any actual hardware TEE. Through performance measurements and a user study we demonstrate that Open-TEE is efficient and easy to use. We have made Open- TEE freely available as open source.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015, Helsinki, Finland, August 20-22, 201

Implementing Trusted Terminals with a and SITDRM

AbstractThe SITDRM Enterprise system [N. Sheppard, R. Safavi-Naini “Protecting Privacy with the MPEG-21 IPMP Framework”. International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2006, pp. 152–171] protects private customer data by allowing customers to provide policies in the form of a machine-readable license. When employees of an organization want to use customers' data, they must be forced to abide by the licences provided. Some sort of hardened terminal must be used to ensure that not only the hardware and software will cooperate, but that the user of the terminal will too. We use the Trusted Computing Group's specifications for a trusted platform upon which to build a data user terminal that can be proved to implement correct license-enforcing behavior. A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and a TPM-using operating system are all that may be required to construct a verifiably secure terminal

Revisiting software protection

We provide a selective survey on software protection, including approaches to software tamper resistance, obfuscation, software diversity, and white-box cryptography. We review the early literature in the area plus recent activities related to trusted platforms, and discuss challenges and future directions

Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement

In an effort to control flows of unauthorized information, the major copyright industries are pursuing a range of strategies designed to distribute copyright enforcement functions across a wide range of actors and to embed these functions within communications networks, protocols, and devices. Some of these strategies have received considerable academic and public scrutiny, but much less attention has been paid to the ways in which all of them overlap and intersect with one another. This article offers a framework for theorizing this process. The distributed extension of intellectual property enforcement into private spaces and throughout communications networks can be understood as a new, hybrid species of disciplinary regime that locates the justification for its pervasive reach in a permanent state of crisis. This hybrid regime derives its force neither primarily from centralized authority nor primarily from decentralized, internalized norms, but instead from a set of coordinated processes for authorizing flows of information. Although the success of this project is not yet assured, its odds of success are by no means remote as skeptics have suggested. Power to implement crisis management in the decentralized marketplace for digital content arises from a confluence of private and public interests and is amplified by the dynamics of technical standards processes. The emergent regime of pervasively distributed copyright enforcement has profound implications for the production of the networked information society

Self-Protecting Documents for Cloud Storage Security

International audienceInformation security is currently one of the most important issues in information systems. This concerns the confidentiality of information but also its integrity and availability. The problem becomes even more difficult when several companies are working together on a project and that the various documents "go out of" their respective information systems. We propose an architecture in which the documents themselves ensure their security and thus can be exchanged over uncontrolled resources such as cloud storage or even USB flash drives. For this we encapsulate within the document itself some security components (e.g. access control, usage control) to achieve an autonomic document architecture for Enterprise DRM (E-DRM). Using such self-protecting documents, a company can ensure security and privacy for its documents when outsourcing storage services (e.g. cloud)

A First Look at Digital Rights Management Systems for Secure Mobile Content Delivery

Digital rights management (DRM) solutions aim to prevent the copying or distribution of copyrighted material. On mobile devices, a variety of DRM technologies have become widely deployed. However, a detailed security study comparing their internal workings, and their strengths and weaknesses, remains missing in the existing literature. In this paper, we present the first detailed security analysis of mobile DRM systems, addressing the modern paradigm of cloud-based content delivery followed by major platforms, such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. We extensively analyse the security of three widely used DRM solutions -- Google Widevine, Apple FairPlay, and Microsoft PlayReady -- deployed on billions of devices worldwide. We then consolidate their features and capabilities, deriving common features and security properties for their evaluation. Furthermore, we identify some design-level shortcomings that render them vulnerable to emerging attacks within the state of the art, including micro-architectural side-channel vulnerabilities and an absence of post-quantum security. Lastly, we propose mitigations and suggest future directions of research