Biblio
With the rising popularity of file-sharing services such as Google Drive and Dropbox in the workflows of individuals and corporations alike, the protection of client-outsourced data from unauthorized access or tampering remains a major security concern. Existing cryptographic solutions to this problem typically require server-side support, involve non-trivial key management on the part of users, and suffer from severe re-encryption penalties upon access revocations. This combination of performance overheads and management burdens makes this class of solutions undesirable in situations where performant, platform-agnostic, dynamic sharing of user content is required. We present NEXUS, a stackable filesystem that leverages trusted hardware to provide confidentiality and integrity for user files stored on untrusted platforms. NEXUS is explicitly designed to balance security, portability, and performance: it supports dynamic sharing of protected volumes on any platform exposing a file access API without requiring server-side support, enables the use of fine-grained access control policies to allow for selective sharing, and avoids the key revocation and file re-encryption overheads associated with other cryptographic approaches to access control. This combination of features is made possible by the use of a client-side Intel SGX enclave that is used to protect and share NEXUS volumes, ensuring that cryptographic keys never leave enclave memory and obviating the need to reencrypt files upon revocation of access rights. We implemented a NEXUS prototype that runs on top of the AFS filesystem and show that it incurs ×2 overhead for a variety of common file and database operations.
The Internet of Things (IoT), an emerging global network of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices within the existing Internet infrastructure, is transforming how we live and work by increasing the connectedness of people and things on a scale that was once unimaginable. In addition to increased communication efficiency between connected objects, the IoT also brings new security and privacy challenges. Comprehensive measures that enable IoT device authentication and secure access control need to be established. Existing hardware, software, and network protection methods, however, are designed against fraction of real security issues and lack the capability to trace the provenance and history information of IoT devices. To mitigate this shortcoming, we propose an RFID-enabled solution that aims at protecting endpoint devices in IoT supply chain. We take advantage of the connection between RFID tag and control chip in an IoT device to enable data transfer from tag memory to centralized database for authentication once deployed. Finally, we evaluate the security of our proposed scheme against various attacks.