Biblio

This paper aims to address the security challenges on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) raised by modeling attacks and denial of service (DoS) attacks. We develop a hardware isolation-based secure architecture extension, namely PUFSec, to protect the target PUF from security compromises without modifying the internal PUF design. PUFSec achieves the security protection by physically isolating the PUF hardware and data from the attack surfaces accessible by the adversaries. Furthermore, we deploy strictly enforced security policies within PUFSec, which authenticate the incoming PUF challenges and prevent attackers from collecting sufficient PUF responses to issue modeling attacks or interfering with the PUF workflow to launch DoS attacks. We implement our PUFSec framework on a Xilinx SoC equipped with ARM processor. Our experimental results on the real hardware prove the enhanced security and the low performance and power overhead brought by PUFSec.

Critical resource sharing among multiple entities in a processing system is inevitable, which in turn calls for the presence of appropriate authentication and access control mechanisms. Generally speaking, these mechanisms are implemented via trusted software "policy checkers" that enforce certain high level application-specific "rules" to enforce a policy. Whether implemented as operating system modules or embedded inside the application ad hoc, these policy checkers expose additional attack surface in addition to the application logic. In order to protect application software from an adversary, modern secure processing platforms, such as Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), employ principled hardware isolation to offer secure software containers or enclaves to execute trusted sensitive code with some integrity and privacy guarantees against a privileged software adversary. We extend this model further and propose using these hardware isolation mechanisms to shield the authentication and access control logic essential to policy checker software. While relying on the fundamental features of modern secure processors, our framework introduces productive software design guidelines which enable a guarded environment to execute sensitive policy checking code - hence enforcing application control flow integrity - and afford flexibility to the application designer to construct appropriate high-level policies to customize policy checker software.

This paper develops a new lightweight secure sensing technique using hardware isolation. We focus on protecting the sensor from unauthorized accesses, which can be issued by attackers attempting to compromise the security and privacy of the sensed data. We satisfy the security requirements by employing the hardware isolation feature provided by the secure processor of the target sensor system. In particular, we deploy the sensor in a hardware isolated secure environment, which eliminates the potential vulnerability exposed to unauthorized attackers. We implement the hardware isolation-based secure sensing approach on an Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC leveraging ARM TrustZone. Our experiments and security analysis on the real hardware prove the effectiveness and low overhead of the proposed approach.