Citizen Electronic Identities using TPM 2.0

Electronic Identification (eID) is becoming commonplace in several European countries. eID is typically used to authenticate to government e-services, but is also used for other services, such as public transit, e-banking, and physical security access control. Typical eID tokens take the form of physical smart cards, but successes in merging eID into phone operator SIM cards show that eID tokens integrated into a personal device can offer better usability compared to standalone tokens. At the same time, trusted hardware that enables secure storage and isolated processing of sensitive data have become commonplace both on PC platforms as well as mobile devices. Some time ago, the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) released the version 2.0 of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification. We propose an eID architecture based on the new, rich authorization model introduced in the TCGs TPM 2.0. The goal of the design is to improve the overall security and usability compared to traditional smart card-based solutions. We also provide, to the best our knowledge, the first accessible description of the TPM 2.0 authorization model.Comment: This work is based on an earlier work: Citizen Electronic Identities using TPM 2.0, to appear in the Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Trustworthy embedded devices, TrustED'14, November 3, 2014, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2666141.266614

simTPM: User-centric TPM for Mobile Devices

Trusted Platform Modules are valuable building blocks for security solutions and have also been recognized as beneficial for security on mobile platforms, like smartphones and tablets. However, strict space, cost, and power constraints of mobile devices prohibit an implementation as dedicated on-board chip and the incumbent implementations are software TPMs protected by Trusted Execution Environments. In this paper, we present simTPM, an alternative implementation of a mobile TPM based on the SIM card available in mobile platforms. We solve the technical challenge of implementing a TPM2.0 in the resource-constrained SIM card environment and integrate our simTPM into the secure boot chain of the ARM Trusted Firmware on a HiKey960 reference board. Most notably, we address the challenge of how a removable TPM can be bound to the host device’s root of trust for measurement. As such, our solution not only provides a mobile TPM that avoids additional hardware while using a dedicated, strongly protected environment, but also offers promising synergies with co-existing TEE-based TPMs. In particular, simTPM offers a user-centric trusted module. Using performance benchmarks, we show that our simTPM has competitive speed with a reported TEE-based TPM and a hardware-based TPM

Securing dynamic itineraries for mobile agent applications

In this paper we present a novel mechanism for the protection of dynamic itineraries for mobile agent applications. Itineraries that are decided as the agent goes are essential in complex applications based on mobile agents, but no approach has been presented until now to protect them. We have conceived a cryptographic scheme for shielding dynamic itineraries from tampering, impersonation and disclosure. By using trust strategically, our scheme provides a balanced trade-off between flexibility and security. Our protection scheme has been thought always bearing in mind a feasible implementation, and thus facilitates the development of applications that make use of it. An example application based on a real healthcare scenario is also presented to show its operation

Secure Virtualization and Multicore Platforms State-of-the-Art report

SVaM

LPKI - A Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure for the Mobile Environments

The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is the great concern.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 Figure

Community-Based Security for the Internet of Things

With more and more devices becoming connectable to the internet, the number of services but also a lot of threats increases dramatically. Security is often a secondary matter behind functionality and comfort, but the problem has already been recognized. Still, with many IoT devices being deployed already, security will come step-by-step and through updates, patches and new versions of apps and IoT software. While these updates can be safely retrieved from app stores, the problems kick in via jailbroken devices and with the variety of untrusted sources arising on the internet. Since hacking is typically a community effort? these days, security could be a community goal too. The challenges are manifold, and one reason for weak or absent security on IoT devices is their weak computational power. In this chapter, we discuss a community based security mechanism in which devices mutually aid each other in secure software management. We discuss game-theoretic methods of community formation and light-weight cryptographic means to accomplish authentic software deployment inside the IoT device community