Trusted Platform Module Commands Research Articles

Emulating Trusted Platform Module 2.0 on Raspberry Pi 2

A computer hijacked by a malware may pretend that it is normal as usual and retrieve secrets from storage of itself and other victim computers. By adopting trusted computing technology a computer’s former health status cannot be forged. Computers can thus detect the change of health status of a hijacked computer and prevent the leakage of the secrets. As Trusted Computing Group (TCG) proposed Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification, IBM implemented software TPM (sTPM) and utilities for engineer who wants to learn the operating principle of TPM. Meanwhile, the blooming of tiny size, but powerful, computers, e.g. Raspberry Pi 2 (Rpi2), attract ones to develop some dedicated applications on the computers. In this article, we report the verified steps for installing new sTPM version on RPi2. After the installation, we also test the functionality and evaluate the performance of the sTPM with some major TPM Commands. The real behaviour of and the traffic between the host computer and the emulated TPM can thus be learned easily.

EMULATING TRUSTED PLATFORM MODULE 2.0 ON RASPBERRY PI 2

A computer hijacked by a malware may pretend that it is normal as usual and retrieve secrets from storage of itself and other victim computers. By adopting trusted computing technology a computer’s former health status cannot be forged. Computers can thus detect the change of health status of a hijacked computer and prevent the leakage of the secrets. As Trusted Computing Group (TCG) proposed Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification, IBM implemented software TPM (sTPM) and utilities for engineer who wants to learn the operating principle of TPM. Meanwhile, the blooming of tiny size, but powerful, computers, e.g. Raspberry Pi 2 (Rpi2), attract ones to develop some dedicated applications on the computers. In this article, we report the verified steps for installing new sTPM version on RPi2. After the installation, we also test the functionality and evaluate the performance of the sTPM with some major TPM Commands. The real behaviour of and the traffic between the host computer and the emulated TPM can thus be learned easily.

TPM에서 명령어 인가에 대한 오프라인 사전 공격과 대응책

TPM(Trusted Platform Module)은 신뢰 컴퓨팅 환경을 구성하기 위해 근간이 되는 하드웨어 칩으로서 이 칩의 주요 기능들을 사용하기 위해서는 명령어에 대한 사전 인가 과정이 필요하다. TPM 명령어 인가 과정은 명령어 사용자가 정당한 비밀 정보(usage secret)를 알고 있는 사용자인지를 TPM에게 인지시키는 과정이다. 명령어 인가에 사용되는 비밀 정보는 패스워드 형식이어서 공격자가 사용자와 TPM간의 전송 메시지를 도청할 수 있다면 오프 라인 사전 공격을 통해 유추될 가능성이 있다. 본 논문에서는 이론적으로 제시된 오프라인 사전 공격(off-line dictionary attack)이 가능한지 실제 TPM 칩을 장착한 PC 환경에서 그 가능성을 검증하고 이 공격을 방어하기 위한 새로운 대응책을 제안하였다. 제안하는 대응책은 현재 사용 중인 TPM 칩의 명령어 구조를 바꾸지 않은 상태에서 바로 응용할 수 있어 이전의 대응책보다 효과적으로 적용할 수 있다. The TPM is a hardware chip for making a trusted environment on computing system. We previously need a command authorization process to use principal TPM commands. The command authorization is used to verify an user who knows a usage secret to TPM chip. Since the user uses a simple password to compute usage secret, an attacker can retrieve the password by evasdropping messages between user and TPM chip and applying off-line dictionary attack. In this paper, we simulate the off-line dictionary attack in real PC environment adopted a TPM chip and propose a novel countermeasure to defeat this attack. Our proposed method is very efficient due to its simplicity and adaptability without any modification of TPM command structures.

TPM 명령어 인가 프로토콜에 대한 내부자 공격 취약점 분석 및 대응책

TPM(Trusted Platform Module)은 신뢰된 컴퓨팅 환경을 구성하기 위해 플랫폼 내부에 부착된 하드웨어 칩이다. TPM의 핵심 명령어들 중에서 정당한 사용자만이 TPM을 사용할 수 있도록 명령어에 대한 인가(authorization)가 선행되어야 한다. 즉, 사용자는 TPM 칩에게 명령어 인가를 받기 위해 OIAP(Object-Independent Authorization Protocol)이나 OSAP(Object-Specific Authorization Protocol) 프로토콜을 사용한다. 그러나 최근 Chen과 Ryan은 단일 플랫폼 내의 멀티유저 환경에서 내부 공격자가 TPM으로 위장하는 공격에 취약함을 밝히고 그 대응책으로 SKAP(Session Key Authorization Protocol) 프로토콜을 이론적으로 제안하였다. 본 논문에서는 실제 PC에 TPM 칩을 장착한 상태에서 OSAP에 대한 내부자 공격이 실제로 가능함을 인가 프로토콜 실험을 통해 확인하였다. 또한 이전의 대응 방법인 SKAP에서 명령어 구조 변경 및 대칭 키 암호 연산이 필요했던 점을 개선하여 보다 효과적인 내부자 공격 대응책을 제안하였다. 제안 프로토콜에서는 OSAP 명령어 체계만 간단히 수정하고 사용자 및 TPM 칩에서 각각 RSA 암 복호 연산 한번만 추가하면 내부자 공격을 막을 수 있다. The TPM(Trusted Platform Module) is a hardware chip to support a trusted computing environment. A rightful user needs a command authorization process in order to use principal TPM commands. To get command authorization from TPM chip, the user should perform the OIAP(Object-Independent Authorization Protocol) or OSAP(Object-Specific Authorization Protocol). Recently, Chen and Ryan alerted the vulnerability of insider attack on TPM command authorization protocol in multi-user environment and presented a countermeasure protocol SKAP(Session Key Authorization Protocol). In this paper, we simulated the possibility of insider attack on OSAP authorization protocol in real PC environment adopted a TPM chip. Furthermore, we proposed a novel countermeasure to defeat this insider attack and improve SKAP's disadvantages such as change of command suructures and need of symmetric key encryption algorithm. Our proposed protocol can prevent from insider attack by modifying of only OSAP command structure and adding of RSA encryption on user and decryption on TPM.

Analysis and design of a hardware/software trusted platform module for embedded systems

Trusted platforms have been proposed as a promising approach to enhance the security of general-purpose computing systems. However, for many resource-constrained embedded systems, the size and cost overheads of a separate Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip are not acceptable. One alternative is to use a software-based TPM, which implements TPM functions using software that executes in a protected execution domain on the embedded processor itself. However, since many embedded systems have limited processing capabilities and are battery-powered, it is also important to ensure that the computational and energy requirements for SW-TPMs are acceptable. In this article, we perform an evaluation of the energy and execution time overheads for a SW-TPM implementation on a handheld appliance (Sharp Zaurus PDA). We characterize the execution time and energy required by each TPM command through actual measurements on the target platform. We observe that for most commands, overheads are primarily due to the use of 2,048-bit RSA operations that are performed within the SW-TPM. In order to alleviate SW-TPM overheads, we evaluate the use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as a replacement for the RSA algorithm specified in the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) standards. In addition, we also evaluate the overheads of using the SW-TPM in the context of various end applications, including trusted boot of the Linux operating system (OS), a secure VoIP client, and a secure Web browser. Furthermore, we analyze the computational workload involved in running SW-TPM commands using ECC. We then present a suite of hardware and software enhancements to accelerate these commands—generic custom instructions and exploitation of parallel processing capabilities in multiprocessor systems-on-chip (SoCs). We report results of evaluating the proposed architectures on a commercial embedded processor (Xtensa from Tensilica). Through uniprocessor and multiprocessor optimizations, we could achieve speed-ups of up to 5.71X for individual TPM commands.

TPM context manager and dynamic configuration management for trusted virtualization platform

It is absolutely critical that trusted configuration management which significantly affects trust chain establishment, sealing storage and remote attestation, especially in trusted virtualization platform like Xen whose system configuration changes easily. TPM (trusted platform module) context manager is presented to carry out dynamic configuration management for virtual machine. It manages the TPM command requests and VM (virtual machine) configurations. The dynamic configuration representation method based on Merkle hash tree is explicitly proposed against TCG (trusted computing group) static configuration representation. It reflects the true VM status in real time even if the configuration has changed, and it eliminates the invalidation of configuration representation, sealing storage and remote attestation. TPM context manager supports TCG storage protection, remote attestation etc, which greatly enhances the security on trusted virtualization platform.