Modern CPU designs are beginning to incorporate secure hardware
features, but leave developers with little control over both the set
of features and when and whether updates are available. Reconfigurable logic (e.g., FPGAs) has been proposed as an alternative as it
is both hardware, so can have similar capabilities at a reasonable
performance degradation, and programmable, allowing customization of the secure hardware. This programmability, however, opens
new attack vectors that allow an adversary to re-program the FPGA.
Past attempts to solve this rely on a party maintaining a shared key
with the FPGA, but these business processes to keep that key secret
have been shown to be quite vulnerable.
In this paper, we propose a new mechanism which eliminates
the trust dependence on third party processes. This new mechanism consists of a self-provisioning stage, where keys are generated
internal to the FPGA and never exposed externally, coupled with
a secure update mechanism which allows updates to be governed
by a policy defined by the secure hardware application. To demonstrate, we fully implemented these mechanisms on a Xilinx Zynq
UltraScale+ FPGA along with an example secure co-processor with
remote attestation with a flexible root of trust (in contrast to Intel
SGX which fixes the root of trust to be Intel). Our performance
evaluation of two applications, a password manager and a contact
matching application, illustrates using FPGAs is practical.
more »
« less
Multilayer Camouflaged Secure Boot for SoCs
Reconfigurable logic enables architectural updates for embedded devices by providing the ability to reprogram partial or entire device. However, this flexibility can be leveraged by the adversary to compromise the device boot process by modifying the bitstream or the boot process with physical or remote access of device placed in a remote field. We propose a novel multilayer secure boot mechanism for SoCs with a two-stage secure boot process. First stage uses device bound unique response as a key to decrypt application logic. The security function is extended at runtime by integrating intermittent architecture and application locking mechanism to reveal correct functionality.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1814420
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10173298
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Multilayer Camouflaged Secure Boot for SoCs
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 56 to 61
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Several cyber-physical systems use real-time restart-based embedded systems with the Simplex architecture to provide safety guarantees against system faults. Some approaches have been developed to protect such systems from security violations too, but none of these approaches can prevent an adversary from modifying the operating system or application code to execute an attack that persists even after a reboot. In this work, we present a secure boot mechanism to restore real-time restart-based embedded systems into a secure computing environment after every restart. We analyze the delay introduced by the proposed security feature and present preliminary results to demonstrate the viability of our approach using an open-source bootloader and real-time operating system.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Ensuring the integrity of embedded programmable logic controllers (PLCs) is critical for safe operation of industrial control systems. In particular, a cyber-attack could manipulate control logic running on the PLCs to bring the process of safety-critical application into unsafe states. Unfortunately, PLCs are typically not equipped with hardware support that allows the use of techniques such as remote attestation to verify the integrity of the logic code. In addition, so far remote attestation is not able to verify the integrity of the physical process controlled by the PLC. In this work, we present PAtt, a system that combines remote software attestation with control process validation. PAtt leverages operation permutations—subtle changes in the operation sequences based on integrity measurements—which do not affect the physical process but yield unique traces of sensor readings during execution. By encoding integrity measurements of the PLC’s memory state (software and data) into its control operation, our system allows to remotely verify the integrity of the control logic based on the resulting sensor traces. We implement the proposed system on a real PLC controlling a robot arm, and demonstrate its feasibility. Our implementation enables the detection of attackers that manipulate the PLC logic to change process state and/or report spoofed sensor readings (with an accuracy of 97% against tested attacks).more » « less
-
Fernanda Kastensmidt Ricardo Reis Aida Todri-Sanial Hai (Ed.)The scope of Smart electronics and its increasing market worldwide has made cybersecurity an important challenge. The Security-by-Design (SbD) principle, an emerging cybersecurity area, focuses on building security/privacy-enabled primitives at the design stage of an electronic system. This paper proposes a novel Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for SbD primitive. The proposed SbD primitive works by performing secure verification of the PUF key using TPM’s Encryption and Decryption engine. The securely verified PUF Key is then bound to TPM using Platform Configuration Registers (PCR). PCRs in TPM facilitate a secure boot process and effective access control to TPM’s NonVolatile memory through an enhanced authorization policy. By binding PUF with PCR in TPM, a novel PUF-based access control policy can be defined, bringing in a new security ecosystem for the emerging Internet-of-Everything era. The proposed SbD approach has been experimentally validated by successfully integrating various PUF topologies with Hardware TPM.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)The domain wall-magnetic tunnel junction (DW-MTJ) is a spintronic device that enables efficient logic circuit design because of its low energy consumption, small size, and non-volatility. Furthermore, the DW-MTJ is one of the few spintronic devices for which a direct cascading mechanism is experimentally demonstrated without any extra buffers; this enables potential design and fabrication of a large-scale DW-MTJ logic system. However, DW-MTJ logic relies on the conversion between electrical signals and magnetic states which is sensitive to process imperfection. Therefore, it is important to analyze the robustness of such DW-MTJ devices to anticipate the system reliability before fabrication. Here we propose a new DW-MTJ model that integrates the impacts of process variation to enable the analysis and optimization of DW-MTJ logic. This will allow circuit and device design that enhances the robustness of DW-MTJ logic and advances the development of energy-efficient spintronic computing systems.more » « less