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1. Trusted IP Solution in Multi-tenant Cloud FPGA Platform

   https://doi.org/10.1109/WF-IoT54382.2022.10152167  

   Ahmed, Muhammed Kawser ; Saha, Sujan Kumar ; Bobda, Christophe ( October 2022 , 2022 IEEE 8th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT))

   Because FPGAs outperform traditional processing cores like CPUs and GPUs in terms of performance per watt and flexibility, they are being used more and more in cloud and data center applications. There are growing worries about the security risks posed by multi-tenant sharing as the demand for hardware acceleration increases and gradually gives way to FPGA multi-tenancy in the cloud. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of FPGA-accelerated applications may be compromised if space-shared FPGAs are made available to many cloud tenants. We propose a root of trust-based trusted execution mechanism called TrustToken to prevent harmful software-level attackers from getting unauthorized access and jeopardizing security. With safe key creation and truly random sources, TrustToken creates a security block that serves as the foundation of trust-based IP security. By offering crucial security characteristics, such as secure, isolated execution and trusted user interaction, TrustToken only permits trustworthy connection between the non-trusted third-party IP and the rest of the SoC environment. The suggested approach does this by connecting the third-party IP interface to the TrustToken Controller and running run-time checks on the correctness of the IP authorization(Token) signals. With an emphasis on software-based assaults targeting unauthorized access and information leakage, we offer a noble hardware/software architecture for trusted execution in FPGA-accelerated clouds and data centers. 

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2. Secure Distributed Applications the Decent Way

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3457340.3458304  

   Zheng, Haofan ; Arden, Owen ( May 2021 , ASSS '21: Proceedings of the 2021 International Symposium on Advanced Security on Software and Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Remote attestation (RA) authenticates code running in trusted execution environments (TEEs), allowing trusted code to be deployed even on untrusted hosts. However, trust relationships established by one component in a distributed application may impact the security of other components, making it difficult to reason about the security of the application as a whole. Furthermore, traditional RA approaches interact badly with modern web service design, which tends to employ small interacting microservices, short session lifetimes, and little or no state. This paper presents the Decent Application Platform, a framework for building secure decentralized applications. Decent applications authenticate and authorize distributed enclave components using a protocol based on self-attestation certificates, a reusable credential based on RA and verifiable by a third party. Components mutually authenticate each other not only based on their code, but also based on the other components they trust, ensuring that no transitively-connected components receive unauthorized information. While some other TEE frameworks support mutual authentication in some form, Decent is the only system that supports mutual authentication without requiring an additional trusted third party besides the trusted hardware's manufacturer. We have verified the secrecy and authenticity of Decent application data in ProVerif, and implemented two applications to evaluate Decent's expressiveness and performance: DecentRide, a ride-sharing service, and DecentHT, a distributed hash table. On the YCSB benchmark, we show that DecentHT achieves 7.5x higher throughput and 3.67x lower latency compared to a non-Decent implementation. 

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3. TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks

   Moghimi, Daniel ; Sunar, Berk ; Eisenbarth, Thomas ; Heninger, Nadia ( January 2020 , Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium)

   null (Ed.)

   Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we perform a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on commodity computers. Our analysis reveals that some of these devices feature secret-dependent execution times during signature generation based on elliptic curves. In particular, we discovered timing leakage on an Intel firmware based TPM as well as a hardware TPM. We show how this information allows an attacker to apply lattice techniques to recover 256-bit private keys for ECDSA and ECSchnorr signatures. On Intel fTPM, our key recovery succeeds after about 1,300 observations and in less than two minutes. Similarly, we extract the private ECDSA key from a hardware TPM manufactured by STMicroelectronics, which is certified at Common Criteria (CC) EAL 4+, after fewer than 40,000 observations. We further highlight the impact of these vulnerabilities by demonstrating a remote attack against a StrongSwan IPsec VPN that uses a TPM to generate the digital signatures for authentication. In this attack, the remote client recovers the server’s private authentication key by timing only 45,000 authentication handshakes via a network connection. The vulnerabilities we have uncovered emphasize the difficulty of correctly implementing known constant-time techniques, and show the importance of evolutionary testing and transparent evaluation of cryptographic implementations. Even certified devices that claim resistance against attacks require additional scrutiny by the community and industry, as we learn more about these attacks. 

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4. MOSE: Practical Multi-User Oblivious Storage via Secure Enclaves

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3374664.3375749  

   Hoang, Thang ; Behnia, Rouzbeh ; Jang, Yeongjin ; Yavuz, Attila A. ( March 2020 , Proceedings of the Tenth {ACM} Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy)

   null (Ed.)

   Multi-user oblivious storage allows users to access their shared data on the cloud while retaining access pattern obliviousness and data confidentiality simultaneously. Most secure and efficient oblivious storage systems focus on the utilization of the maximum network bandwidth in serving concurrent accesses via a trusted proxy. How- ever, since the proxy executes a standard ORAM protocol over the network, the performance is capped by the network bandwidth and latency. Moreover, some important features such as access control and security against active adversaries have not been thoroughly explored in such proxy settings. In this paper, we propose MOSE, a multi-user oblivious storage system that is efficient and enjoys from some desirable security properties. Our main idea is to harness a secure enclave, namely Intel SGX, residing on the untrusted storage server to execute proxy logic, thereby, minimizing the network bottleneck of proxy-based designs. In this regard, we address various technical design challenges such as memory constraints, side-channel attacks and scalability issues when enabling proxy logic in the secure enclave. We present a formal security model and analysis for secure enclave multi-user ORAM with access control. We optimize MOSE to boost its throughput in serving concurrent requests. We implemented MOSE and evaluated its performance on commodity hardware. Our evaluation confirmed the efficiency of MOSE, where it achieves approximately two orders of magnitudes higher throughput than the state-of-the-art proxy-based design, and also, its performance is scalable proportional to the available system resources. 

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5. TPM-Fail:TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks

   Moghimi, Daniel ; Sunar, Berk ; Eisenbarth, Thomas ; Heninger, Nadia ( January 2020 , 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20))

   null (Ed.)

   Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardwarebased root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we perform a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on commodity computers. Our analysis reveals that some of these devices feature secret-dependent execution times during signature generation based on elliptic curves. In particular, we discovered timing leakage on an Intel firmwarebased TPM as well as a hardware TPM. We show how this information allows an attacker to apply lattice techniques to recover 256-bit private keys for ECDSA and ECSchnorr signatures. On Intel fTPM, our key recovery succeeds after about 1,300 observations and in less than two minutes. Similarly, we extract the private ECDSA key from a hardware TPM manufactured by STMicroelectronics, which is certified at Common Criteria (CC) EAL 4+, after fewer than 40,000 observations. We further highlight the impact of these vulnerabilities by demonstrating a remote attack against a StrongSwan IPsec VPN that uses a TPM to generate the digital signatures for authentication. In this attack, the remote client recovers the server’s private authentication key by timing only 45,000 authentication handshakes via a network connection. The vulnerabilities we have uncovered emphasize the difficulty of correctly implementing known constant-time techniques, and show the importance of evolutionary testing and transparent evaluation of cryptographic implementations. Even certified devices that claim resistance against attacks require additional scrutiny by the community and industry, as we learn more about these attacks. 

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