Biblio

PUFs are an emerging security primitive that offers a lightweight security alternative to highly constrained devices like RFIDs. PUFs used in authentication protocols however suffer from unreliable outputs. This hinders their scaling, which is necessary for increased security, and makes them also problematic to use with cryptographic functions. We introduce a new Dual Arbiter PUF design that reveals additional information concerning the stability of the outputs. We then employ a novel filtering scheme that discards unreliable outputs with a minimum number of evaluations, greatly reducing the BER of the PUF.

Virtualization based memory isolation has been widely used as a security primitive in many security systems. This paper firstly provides an in-depth analysis of its effectiveness in the multicore setting, a first in the literature. Our study reveals that memory isolation by itself is inadequate for security. Due to the fundamental design choices in hardware, it faces several challenging issues including page table maintenance, address mapping validation and thread identification. As demonstrated by our attacks implemented on XMHF and BitVisor, these issues undermine the security of memory isolation. Next, we propose a new isolation approach that is immune to the aforementioned problems. In our design, the hypervisor constructs a fully isolated micro computing environment (FIMCE) that exposes a minimal attack surface to an untrusted OS on a multicore platform. By virtue of its architectural niche, FIMCE offers stronger assurance and greater versatility than memory isolation. We have built a prototype of FIMCE and measured its performance. To show the benefits of using FIMCE as a building block, we have also implemented several practical applications which cannot be securely realized by using memory isolation alone.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become ubiquitous in our daily life as billions of devices are connected through the Internet infrastructure. However, the rapid increase of IoT devices brings many non-traditional challenges for system design and implementation. In this paper, we focus on the hardware security vulnerabilities and ultra-low power design requirement of IoT devices. We briefly survey the existing design methods to address these issues. Then we propose an approximate computing based information hiding approach that provides security with low power. We demonstrate that this security primitive can be applied for security applications such as digital watermarking, fingerprinting, device authentication, and lightweight encryption.