Mavroudis, V;
Cerulli, A;
Svenda, P;
Cvrcek, D;
Klinec, D;
Danezis, G;
(2017)
A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components.
In: Evans, D and Malkin, T and Xu, D, (eds.)
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
(pp. pp. 1583-1600).
ACM: New York, USA.
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Abstract
The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs) are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products. Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems. While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and complexity. This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components. The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components. Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure cryptocoprocessors, verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components |
| Event: | 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 30 October - 3 November 2017, Dallas, Texas, USA |
| Location: | Dallas, USA |
| Dates: | 30 October 2017 - 03 November 2017 |
| ISBN-13: | 9781450349468 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3133956.3133961 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1145/3133956.3133961 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | cryptographic hardware; hardware trojans; backdoor-tolerance; secure architecture |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1573476 |
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