280 research outputs found
Hardware-based Security for Virtual Trusted Platform Modules
Virtual Trusted Platform modules (TPMs) were proposed as a software-based
alternative to the hardware-based TPMs to allow the use of their cryptographic
functionalities in scenarios where multiple TPMs are required in a single
platform, such as in virtualized environments. However, virtualizing TPMs,
especially virutalizing the Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs), strikes
against one of the core principles of Trusted Computing, namely the need for a
hardware-based root of trust. In this paper we show how strength of
hardware-based security can be gained in virtual PCRs by binding them to their
corresponding hardware PCRs. We propose two approaches for such a binding. For
this purpose, the first variant uses binary hash trees, whereas the other
variant uses incremental hashing. In addition, we present an FPGA-based
implementation of both variants and evaluate their performance
ScaRR: Scalable Runtime Remote Attestation for Complex Systems
The introduction of remote attestation (RA) schemes has allowed academia and
industry to enhance the security of their systems. The commercial products
currently available enable only the validation of static properties, such as
applications fingerprint, and do not handle runtime properties, such as
control-flow correctness. This limitation pushed researchers towards the
identification of new approaches, called runtime RA. However, those mainly work
on embedded devices, which share very few common features with complex systems,
such as virtual machines in a cloud. A naive deployment of runtime RA schemes
for embedded devices on complex systems faces scalability problems, such as the
representation of complex control-flows or slow verification phase.
In this work, we present ScaRR: the first Scalable Runtime Remote attestation
schema for complex systems. Thanks to its novel control-flow model, ScaRR
enables the deployment of runtime RA on any application regardless of its
complexity, by also achieving good performance. We implemented ScaRR and tested
it on the benchmark suite SPEC CPU 2017. We show that ScaRR can validate on
average 2M control-flow events per second, definitely outperforming existing
solutions.Comment: 14 page
Deploying Virtual Machines on Shared Platforms
In this report, we describe mechanisms for secure deployment of virtual machines on shared platforms looking into a telecommunication cloud use case, which is also presented in this report. The architecture we present focuses on the security requirements of the major stakeholders’ part of the scenario we present. This report comprehensively covers all major security aspects including different security mechanisms and protocols, leveraging existing standards and state-of-the art wherever applicable. In particular, our architecture uses TCG technologies for trust establishment in the deployment of operator virtual machines on shared resource platforms. We also propose a novel procedure for securely launching and cryptographically binding a virtual machine to a target platform thereby protecting the operator virtual machine and its related credentials
Sphinx: A Secure Architecture Based on Binary Code Diversification and Execution Obfuscation
Sphinx, a hardware-software co-design architecture for binary code and
runtime obfuscation. The Sphinx architecture uses binary code diversification
and self-reconfigurable processing elements to maintain application
functionality while obfuscating the binary code and architecture states to
attackers. This approach dramatically reduces an attacker's ability to exploit
information gained from one deployment to attack another deployment. Our
results show that the Sphinx is able to decouple the program's execution time,
power and memory and I/O activities from its functionality. It is also
practical in the sense that the system (both software and hardware) overheads
are minimal.Comment: Boston Area Architecture 2018 Workshop (BARC18
Tree-formed Verification Data for Trusted Platforms
The establishment of trust relationships to a computing platform relies on
validation processes. Validation allows an external entity to build trust in
the expected behaviour of the platform based on provided evidence of the
platform's configuration. In a process like remote attestation, the 'trusted'
platform submits verification data created during a start up process. These
data consist of hardware-protected values of platform configuration registers,
containing nested measurement values, e.g., hash values, of loaded or started
components. Commonly, the register values are created in linear order by a
hardware-secured operation. Fine-grained diagnosis of components, based on the
linear order of verification data and associated measurement logs, is not
optimal. We propose a method to use tree-formed verification data to validate a
platform. Component measurement values represent leaves, and protected
registers represent roots of a hash tree. We describe the basic mechanism of
validating a platform using tree-formed measurement logs and root registers and
show an logarithmic speed-up for the search of faults. Secure creation of a
tree is possible using a limited number of hardware-protected registers and a
single protected operation. In this way, the security of tree-formed
verification data is maintained.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, v3: Reference added, v4: Revised, accepted for
publication in Computers and Securit
Sphinx: a secure architecture based on binary code diversification and execution obfuscation
Sphinx, a hardware-software co-design architecture for binary code and runtime obfuscation. The Sphinx architecture uses binary code diversification and self-reconfigurable processing elements to maintain application functionality while obfuscating the binary code and architecture states to attackers. This approach dramatically reduces an attacker’s ability to exploit information gained from one deployment to attack another deployment. Our results show that the Sphinx is able to decouple the program’s execution time, power and memory and I/O activities from its functionality. It is also practical in the sense that the system (both software and hardware) overheads are minimal.Published versio
A taxonomy of malicious traffic for intrusion detection systems
With the increasing number of network threats it is essential to have a knowledge of existing and new network threats to design better intrusion detection systems. In this paper we propose a taxonomy for classifying network attacks in a consistent way, allowing security researchers to focus their efforts on creating accurate intrusion detection systems and targeted datasets
A Holistic Approach for Trustworthy Distributed Systems with WebAssembly and TEEs
Publish/subscribe systems play a key role in enabling communication between
numerous devices in distributed and large-scale architectures. While widely
adopted, securing such systems often trades portability for additional
integrity and attestation guarantees. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)
offer a potential solution with enclaves to enhance security and trust.
However, application development for TEEs is complex, and many existing
solutions are tied to specific TEE architectures, limiting adaptability.
Current communication protocols also inadequately manage attestation proofs or
expose essential attestation information. This paper introduces a novel
approach using WebAssembly to address these issues, a key enabling technology
nowadays capturing academia and industry attention. We present the design of a
portable and fully attested publish/subscribe middleware system as a holistic
approach for trustworthy and distributed communication between various systems.
Based on this proposal, we have implemented and evaluated in-depth a
fully-fledged publish/subscribe broker running within Intel SGX, compiled in
WebAssembly, and built on top of industry-battled frameworks and standards,
i.e., MQTT and TLS protocols. Our extended TLS protocol preserves the privacy
of attestation information, among other benefits. Our experimental results
showcase most overheads, revealing a 1.55x decrease in message throughput when
using a trusted broker. We open-source the contributions of this work to the
research community to facilitate experimental reproducibility.Comment: This publication incorporates results from the VEDLIoT project, which
received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant agreement No 95719
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