Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction

Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smartphones and browsers executing untrusted third-party code. Preventing unauthorised information flow is a core duty of the operating system, however, present OSes are unable to prevent timing channels. We argue that OSes must provide time protection in addition to the established memory protection. We examine the requirements of time protection, present a design and its implementation in the seL4 microkernel, and evaluate its efficacy as well as performance overhead on Arm and x86 processors

SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX

Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices. This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX, allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this, SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1

UniquID: A Quest to Reconcile Identity Access Management and the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift in computer networking. After decades of human-centered routines, where devices were merely tools that enabled human beings to authenticate themselves and perform activities, we are now dealing with a device-centered paradigm: the devices themselves are actors, not just tools for people. Conventional identity access management (IAM) frameworks were not designed to handle the challenges of IoT. Trying to use traditional IAM systems to reconcile heterogeneous devices and complex federations of online services (e.g., IoT sensors and cloud computing solutions) adds a cumbersome architectural layer that can become hard to maintain and act as a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose UniquID, a blockchain-based solution that overcomes the need for centralized IAM architectures while providing scalability and robustness. We also present the experimental results of a proof-of-concept UniquID enrolment network, and we discuss two different use-cases that show the considerable value of a blockchain-based IAM.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure