Trusted Platform Module Research Articles

Trusted attestation architecture on an infrastructure-as-a-service

Trusted attestation is the main obstruction preventing large-scale promotion of cloud computing. How to extend a trusted relationship from a single physical node to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform is a problem that must be solved. The IaaS platform provides the Virtual Machine (VM), and the Trusted VM, equipped with a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), is the foundation of the trusted IaaS platform. We propose a multi-dimensional trusted attestation architecture that can collect and verify trusted attestation information from the computing nodes, and manage the information centrally on a cloud management platform. The architecture verifies the IaaS’s trusted attestation by apprising the VM, Hypervisor, and host Operating System’s (OS) trusted status. The theory and the technology roadmap were introduced, and the key technologies were analyzed. The key technologies include dynamic measurement of the Hypervisor at the process level, the protection of vTPM instances, the reinforcement of Hypervisor security, and the verification of the IaaS trusted attestation. A prototype was deployed to verify the feasibility of the system. The advantages of the prototype system were compared with the Open CIT (Intel Cloud attestation solution). A performance analysis experiment was performed on computing nodes and the results show that the performance loss is within an acceptable range.

SARA: Sandwiched attestation through remote agents for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

Cluster-based wireless sensor networks have advantages of scalability and efficient communication. However, a major security risk to cluster heads is a malicious code injection attack through which an adversary can completely control a cluster network to deliver fake data and obtain private data. Memory attestation scheme is an effective mechanism for attesting the firmware integrity of an embedded device. Unfortunately, existing hardware-based remote attestation scheme relying on a trusted platform module incurs a considerable storage overhead to cluster heads. Therefore, this article proposes a lightweight hardware-based remote attestation scheme that comprises two remote attestation protocols. A lightweight hardware security module without executing any complicated cryptographic computation is employed and can substantially reduce the development cost and energy consumption compared with the trusted platform module. In the proposed scheme, a base station can attest each individual cluster head while all cluster nodes can simultaneously attest their cluster head in regular intervals. Performance analysis indicates that the storage requirement for cluster heads is independent of the number of attestation sessions. Furthermore, the computational cost of cluster nodes for the proposed scheme is comparable to that of the trusted platform module–based scheme. The proposed scheme is particularly suitable for long-term applications based on lightweight cluster heads.

Perceptrons Helping to Secure VANETs

Security is the main concern in VANETs as in near future smart vehicles will be on road. Smart vehicles have to deal with various systems on road like traffic management system, toll collection systems etc. Many cryptographic techniques are used in VANETs to provide safer communication; one of them is digital signature based on PKI. In this technique, private keys are used to generate digital signatures and these signatures are then used to verify the validity of the message and identity of the sender. These private keys are stored in hardware devices which can be hacked by the third party. In this paper, we propose to apply a new cryptographic technique on these private keys using the artificial neural network to make them secure from intruders. Keywords: TPD (Temper Proof Device); TPM (Trusted Platform Module); EDR (Event Data Recorder); Cryptography; Digital Signatures; ANN (Artificial Neural Network), VANETs.

Design and implementation of an attestation protocol for measured dynamic behavior

Security of applications running on remote devices has become an essential need of enterprises. For this purpose, several software-based solutions have been proposed. However, it has been observed that software solutions are vulnerable to several kinds of attacks. Moreover, they cannot protect and monitor all parts of the system. To overcome this problem, researchers have proposed to monitor a target system from an isolated hardware and store system’s sensitive information in its tamper-proof memory locations. To realize such a solution, Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has proposed the specifications of a co-processor called Trusted Platform Module which is widely available in commodity hardware. Integrity Measurement Architecture is one of the well-known static techniques that brings TCG’s attestation from kernel to the application level. However, this method cannot measure runtime behavior of applications, which is necessary to detect runtime attacks such as buffer overflow and return-oriented programming. In this paper, we have extended the base work which aims to detect runtime vulnerabilities. Current high-level-based attestation protocol has been extended for dynamic behavior collection and verification, and the dynamic behavior is verified via several machine learning algorithms. Our results justify the use of this approach and show that a high rate detection was achieved for datasets of real-world vulnerabilities in the popular Firefox browser.

A Trusted Computing Architecture of Embedded System Based on Improved TPM

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) currently used by PCs is not suitable for embedded systems, it is necessary to improve existing TPM. The paper proposes a trusted computing architecture with new TPM and the cryptographic system developed by China for the embedded system. The improved TPM consists of the Embedded System Trusted Cryptography Module (eTCM) and the Embedded System Trusted Platform Control Module (eTPCM), which are combined and implemented the TPM’s autonomous control, active defense, high-speed encryption/decryption and other function through its internal bus arbitration module and symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic engines to effectively protect the security of embedded system. In our improved TPM, a trusted measurement method with chain model and star type model is used. Finally, the improved TPM is designed by FPGA, and it is used to a trusted PDA to carry out experimental verification. Experiments show that the trusted architecture of the embedded system based on the improved TPM is efficient, reliable and secure.

Trusted Attestation System for Cloud Computing Environment Using Trusted Platform Module

In the context of Trusted Attestation System in Cloud Computing Environment the Root of Trust for Attestation plays a vital role for security feature with Trusted Computing. The main aim of trusted attestation process is to provide an effective mechanism for the interconnected public and private systems in a well secured platform using Trusted Platform Module. The mechanism created by the trusted attestation phase gains assurance about data integrity and trustworthiness. The Trusted Attestation System enables the trusted computing functionalities for all authorized users in the current working environment. The Cloud Computing Environment extends the failure rate as attacks on public data and private data for the trusted system. The authenticated integrity state of a trusted system involves the Root of Trust for Attestation (RTA). In the cloud environment an attested user is trusted to behave with the available standard technologies like management of identity, digital signatures, exchange of credential, certificates and management of key. The trusted attestation system in the cloud environment provides Trust as a service (TaaS) for the generation of key. The credential exchange for the trusted environment enhances the facility for Cloud Computing Environment (CCE).

Virtualization of the Encryption Card for Trust Access in Cloud Computing

The increasing use of virtualization puts stringent security requirements on software integrity and workload isolation of cloud computing. The encryption card provides hardware cryptographic services for users and is believed to be superior to software cryptography. However, we cannot use the encryption card directly in the user domain because of the complicated virtualization mechanisms and the security problems about the user key and the user private data flow. To address these challenges, we propose a new virtualization architecture to ensure the trustworthiness of encryption cards. First, we design a privacy preserving model to ensure the security of the dynamic schedule of encryption cards. Second, we present a hardware trust verification procedure based on the trusted platform module to supply a trusted virtualization hardware foundation. Third, we provide a series of security protocols to establish a trusted chain between users and encryption cards. Finally, we give security proofs of the encryption card virtualization architecture. Based on our prototype implementation, the encryption service provided by the encryption card has higher-level security and higher efficiency than software encryption. It provides strong support for security services of virtualization systems in cloud computing.

Building a Secure Scheme for a Trusted Hardware Sharing Environment

Trusted hardware sharing (THS) system can provide multiple trusted execution environments (TEE) via sharing the trusted hardware (e.g., sharing trusted platform module via virtualization) for stand-alone and isolation scenarios. However, the trusted function requests (TFRs) sent to the trusted hardware are emitted by multiple TEEs, which have to be processed by THS. Since different applications in different TEEs have different security requirements, the data in TFRs need to be protected from being leaked or modified in an unauthorized manner. To address this issue, we present a secure scheme for THS systems based on an information flow model that protects the sensitive data in TFRs. Each TFR is assigned a security level according to their owner, and processed in isolated environments with different security levels. We implement the prototype and conduct the experiments in both shared memory and isolated environments. The results indicate that the introduction of security mechanisms can lead to more time consumption on processing TFRs with the increase in the dimension of security levels. However, this degradation in performance is still acceptable and can be mitigated in the real world, because intensive TFR requests are not present as they are in the experimental environment.

Inhibiting and Detecting Offline Password Cracking Using ErsatzPasswords

In this work, we present a simple, yet effective and practical scheme to improve the security of stored password hashes, increasing the difficulty to crack passwords and exposing cracking attempts. We utilize a hardware-dependent function (HDF), such as a physically unclonable function (PUF) or a hardware security module (HSM), at the authentication server to inhibit offline password discovery. Additionally, a deception mechanism is incorporated to alert administrators of cracking attempts. Using an HDF to generate password hashes hinders attackers from recovering the true passwords without constant access to the HDF. Our scheme can integrate with legacy systems without needing additional servers, changing the structure of the hashed password file, nor modifying client machines. When using our scheme, the structure of the hashed passwords file, e.g., etc/shadow or etc/master.passwd , will appear no different than traditional hashed password files. 1 However, when attackers exfiltrate the hashed password file and attempt to crack it, the passwords they will receive are ErsatzPasswords—“fake passwords.” The ErsatzPasswords scheme is flexible by design, enabling it to be integrated into existing authentication systems without changes to user experience. The proposed scheme is integrated into the pam_unix module as well as two client/server authentication schemes: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication and the Pythia pseudorandom function (PRF) Service [Everspaugh et al. 2015]. The core library to support ErsatzPasswords written in C and Python consists of 255 and 103 lines of code, respectively. The integration of ErsatzPasswords into each explored authentication system required less than 100 lines of additional code. Experimental evaluation of ErsatzPasswords shows an increase in authentication latency on the order of 100ms, which maybe acceptable for real world systems. We also describe a framework for implementing ErsatzPasswords using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

Area, energy, and time assessment for a distributed TPM for distributed trust in IoT clusters

IoT clusters arise from natural human societal clusters such as a house, an airport, and a highway. IoT clusters are heterogeneous with a need for device to device as well as device to user trust. The IoT devices are likely to be thin computing clients. Due to low cost, an individual IoT device is not built to be fault tolerant through redundancy. Hence the trust protocols cannot take the liveness of a device for granted. In fact, the differentiation between a failing device and a malicious device is difficult from the trust protocol perspective. We present a minimal distributed trust layer based on distributed consensus like operations. These distributed primitives are cast in the context of the APIs supported by a trusted platform module (TPM). TPM with its 1024bit RSA is a significant burden on a thin IoT design. We use RNS based slicing of a TPM where in each slice resides within a single IoT device. The overall TPM functionality is distributed among several IoT devices within a cluster. The VLSI area, energy, and time savings of such a distributed TMP implementation is assessed. A sliced/distributed TPM is better suited for an IoT environment based on its resource needs. We demonstrate over 90% time reduction, over 3% area reduction, and over 90% energy reduction per IoT node in order to support TPM protocols.

Analyzing Security Threats to Virtual Machines Monitor in Cloud Computing Environment

The data and applications in cloud computing reside in cyberspace, that allowing to users access data through any connection device, when you need to transfer information over the cloud, you will lose control of it. There are multi types of security challenge must be understood and countermeasures. One of the major security challenges is resources of the cloud computing infrastructures are provided as services over the Internet, and entire data in the cloud computing are reside over network resources, that enables the data to be access through VMs. In this work, we describe security techniques for securing a VCCI, VMMs such as Encryption and Key Management (EKM), Access Control Mechanisms (ACMs), Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), Virtual Firewall (VF), and Trusted Virtual Domains (TVDs). In this paper we focus on security of virtual resources in Virtualized Cloud Computing Infrastructure (VCCI), Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) by describing types of attacks on VCCI, and vulnerabilities of VMMs and we describe the techniques for securing a VCCI.

Deceptive Deletion Triggers Under Coercion

For users in possession of password-protected encrypted data in persistent storage (i.e., “data at rest”), an obvious problem is that the password may be extracted by an adversary through dictionary attacks, or by coercing the user. Traditional full disk encryption (FDE) or plausibly deniable encryption cannot adequately address such situations. Therefore, making data verifiably inaccessible in a stealthy and quick fashion may be the preferred choice, specifically for users, such as government/corporate agents, journalists, and human rights activists with highly confidential secrets, when caught and interrogated in a hostile territory. Using secure storage on a trusted platform module (TPM) and modern CPU’s trusted execution mode (e.g., Intel TXT), we design Gracewipe to enable secure and verifiable deletion of encryption keys through a special deletion password. When coerced, a user can fake compliance and enter the deletion password; and then, the user can prove to the adversary that Gracewipe has been executed and the real key is no longer available (through a TPM quote), hoping for a favorable situation (e.g., end of torture). To unlock the target encryption key, the adversary can only guess passwords through the valid Gracewipe environment with a high-risk of triggering deletion of the real key. Based on our two primary Gracewipe prototypes (i.e., software-based FDE with TrueCrypt and hardware-based FDE with self-encrypting drive), we also design and implement an extended family of unlocking schemes for triggering deletion, to achieve better plausibility, security and usability. We incur between 2–2.5 seconds delay during boot, and no performance penalty at run-time.

Deleting Secret Data with Public Verifiability

Existing software-based data erasure programs can be summarized as following the same one-bit-return protocol: the deletion program performs data erasure and returns either success or failure. However, such a one-bit-return protocol turns the data deletion system into a black box—the user has to trust the outcome but cannot easily verify it. This is especially problematic when the deletion program is encapsulated within a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and the user has no access to the code inside. In this paper, we present a cryptographic solution that aims to make the data deletion process more transparent and verifiable. In contrast to the conventional black/white assumptions about TPM (i.e., either completely trust or distrust), we introduce a third assumption that sits in between: namely, “trust-but-verify”. Our solution enables a user to verify the correct implementation of two important operations inside a TPM without accessing its source code: i.e., the correct encryption of data and the faithful deletion of the key. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept implementation of the SSE system on a resource-constrained Java card to demonstrate its practical feasibility. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic solution to the secure data deletion problem based on a “trust-but-verify” paradigm, together with a concrete prototype implementation.

Survey on key technology development and application in trusted computing

Trusted computing, which can effectively increase the credibility of information system, has made great achievements and is in continuous development. For country who is going to strengthen network construction like China, it is an important fundamental supporting technology worth researching. China is in the international forefront in the field of trusted computing. This paper gives comprehensive introductions to the new development and application of key technologies in trusted computing, such as various trusted platform modules (TPM, TCM, TPCM), TCG Software Stack (TSS), trusted cloud server and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). We illustrate the progressing and application extension of these technologies and also point out some key problems worth studying in the future.

P.1.a.036 - DNA methylation analyses in a pilot study of patients with borderline personality disorder

Security software has been the defence of choice for enterprises for many years in order to protect data and safeguard both devices and networks from malware. This is understandable – for some time, layering software has been the safest and easiest security solution. The cyber-security landscape, however, does not sleep, and is constantly evolving – there have been various developments, including Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and increasingly penetrable network perimeters. Add to these, economic and legal developments – a more mobile workforce, and EU data protection laws on the horizon – and software-based architectures appear more and more unable to properly face the current state of cyberthreats. However, enterprises can now use the hardware within their devices for security purposes, and new operating systems, such as Windows 8, have made this approach a more practical option.Security software has been the defence of choice for enterprises for many years – for some time layering software has been the safest and easiest security solution. However, the threats organisations face are evolving.Enterprises can now use the hardware within their devices for security purposes. Joseph Souren of Wave Systems explains how you can use hardware features such as Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to make your organisation more secure.

Testing Situation Awareness Network for the Electrical Power Infrastructure

The contemporary electrical power infrastructure is exposed to new types of threats. The cause of such threats is related to the large number of new vulnerabilities and architectural weaknesses introduced by the extensive use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in such complex critical systems. The power grid interconnection with the Internet exposes the grid to new types of attacks, such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) or Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. When addressing this situation the usual cyber security technologies are prerequisite, but not sufficient. To counter evolved and highly sophisticated threats such as the APT or DDoS, state-of-the-art technologies including Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) systems, extended Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) are required. Developing and deploying extensive ICT infrastructure that supports wide situational awareness and allows precise command and control is also necessary. In this paper the results of testing the Situational Awareness Network (SAN) designed for the energy sector are presented. The purpose of the tests was to validate the selection of SAN components and check their operational capability in a complex test environment. During the tests' execution appropriate interaction between the components was verified.

A tiny hypervisor-based trusted geolocation framework with minimized TPM operations

Geographic locations of user devices are widely used to provide rich user experience in various environments such as proximity-based marketing, travel information, and cloud computing. Especially, cloud service providers require to utilize actual cloud user’s locations in location-based cloud services like Amazon GovCloud. However, it is not trivial to obtain the trusted geolocations of the user devices because there are many points for attackers to forge the current geolocations of the cloud user devices.In order to solve this security issue, we propose a novel trusted geolocation framework for the cloud user device. The primary mechanism of the proposed framework is to deliver a trusted channel between a geolocation server and a tiny hypervisor in each mobile client. We leverage the Trusted Platform Module and dynamic root of trust measurement to securely attest the geolocations of the cloud devices. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework, we port Etherpad, a cloud word processor, into the trusted geolocation-based cloud service. We also evaluate the performance overhead of our framework in the cloud device and show that it causes only 8.3% overhead in JavaScript benchmark, which indicates the practicality of the proposed framework.

Towards Improving Security in VANET: Some New Possible Attacks and Their Possible Solutions

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is taken more attention from the end user due to its potential safety and non-safety applications. The basic design objective of these applications to serve the users and provide safety of human lives during their journey. The role of the end user is more prominent for next generation vehicular networks. An attacker is one of type of end user, but their role in the network is negative and creates problems for other components of network. So in this paper, we will discuss two new types of attacks which are called road side traffic signal attack and also Internet attack in vehicular network. The authors will explain an attacker's behaviour and how he/she will launch an attack on a road side traffic signal and Internet services and create problems for other users of network. Through different scenarios, it will explain the effect of these attacks on other components of network. Trusted Platform module (TPM) is a security hardware module and it is provided the secure communication in network, so we will discuss in detail how this security module will handle these newly address attacks in network.

Trusted mobile computing: An overview of existing solutions

Nowadays, smartphones are able to process large amounts of data enabling the use of applications for personal or professional use. In these contexts, the smartphone needs to process, store and transfer sensitive data in a secure way. Encryption is a commonly used solution to enforce security but the encryption keys it relies on have also to be securely processed and stored. Several research works have investigated these issues and different solutions have been proposed. They can be classified into two main categories: hardware-based solutions (Secure Elements, Trusted Platform Module and Trusted Execution Environments) and software-based solutions (Virtualization Environments). This paper overviews/surveys these two categories highlighting their pros and cons. Examples of trusted computing applications are then provided for each category. Finally, a discussion is provided about trends and perspectives for trusted mobile computing.

TPM-based remote attestation for Wireless Sensor Networks

It is essential to design a protocol to allow sensor nodes to attest to their trustworthiness for mission-critical applications based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, it is a challenge to evaluate the trustworthiness without appropriate hardware support. Hence, we present a hardware-based remote attestation protocol to tackle the problem within WSNs. In our design, each sensor node is equipped with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) which plays the role of a trusted anchor. We start with the formulation of remote attestation and its security. The complete protocol for both single-hop and multi-hop attestations is then demonstrated. Results show the new protocol is effective, efficient, and secure.