A Generic Security API for Symmetric Key Management on Cryptographic Devices

Abstract

Security APIs are used to define the boundary between trusted and untrusted code. The security properties of existing APIs are not always clear. In this paper, we give a new generic API for managing symmetric keys on a trusted cryptographic device. We state and prove security properties for our API. In particular, our API offers a high level of security even when the host machine is controlled by an attacker. Our API is generic in the sense that it can implement a wide variety of (symmetric key) protocols. As a proof of concept, we give an algorithm for automatically instantiating the API commands for a given key management protocol. We demonstrate the algorithm on a set of key establishment protocols from the Clark-Jacob suite.