Smartphones are becoming increasingly powerful and useful in a work environment. This has led to their adoption at the workplace. Many companies hand out smartphones to their employees and allow employees to bring their own devices to work. There are multiple potential vulnerabilities with such a situation. What happens if the device an employee uses to access secret company data with becomes infected by malware? Existing techniques such as remote attestation is widely used on desktop computers using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to allow remote parties to determine the integrity of a computer. However, no smartphones come equipped with a TPM, resulting in the need of alternate solutions. This report proposes a remote attestation system for the Android platform that allows employers to detect compromised devices. Any modification to an application is detected and reliably reported to a remote party.

Embedded devices permeate our every day lives. They exist in our vehicles, traffic lights, medical equipment, and infrastructure controls. In many cases, improper functionality of these devices can present a physical danger to their users, data or financial loss, etc. Improper functionality can be a result of software or hardware bugs, but now more than ever, is often the result of malicious compromise and tampering, or as it is known colloquially "hacking". We are beginning to witness a proliferation of cyber-crime, and as more devices are built with internet connectivity (in the so called "Internet of Things"), security should be of the utmost concern. Embedded devices have begun to seamlessly merge with our daily existence. Therefore the need for security grows as it more directly affects the safety of our data, property, and even physical health. This thesis presents an FPGA-assisted framework for remote attestation, a security service that allows a remote device to prove to a verifying entity that it can be trusted. In other words, it presents a protocol by which a device (be it an insulin pump, vehicle, etc.) can prove to a user (or other entity) that it can be trusted - i.e. that it has not been "hacked". This is accomplished through executable code integrity verification and run-time monitoring. In essence, the protocol verifies that a device is running authorized and untampered software and makes it known to a verifier in a trusted fashion. We implement the protocol on a physical device to demonstrate its feasibility and to examine its performance impact.

abstract: This research describes software based remote attestation schemes for obtaining the integrity of an executing user application and the Operating System (OS) text section of an untrusted client platform. A trusted external entity issues a challenge to the client platform. The challenge is executable code which the client must execute, and the code generates results which are sent to the external entity. These results provide the external entity an assurance as to whether the client application and the OS are in pristine condition. This work also presents a technique where it can be verified that the application which was attested, did not get replaced by a different application after completion of the attestation. The implementation of these three techniques was achieved entirely in software and is backward compatible with legacy machines on the Intel x86 architecture. This research also presents two approaches to incorporating software based "root of trust" using Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs). The first approach determines the integrity of an executing Guest OS from the Host OS using Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and qemu emulation software. The second approach implements a small VMM called MIvmm that can be utilized as a trusted codebase to build security applications such as those implemented in this research. MIvmm was conceptualized and implemented without using any existing codebase; its minimal size allows it to be trustworthy. Both the VMM approaches leverage processor support for virtualization in the Intel x86 architecture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2011

In recent years, trusted execution environments (TEEs) have seen increasing deployment in computing devices to protect security-critical software from run-time attacks and provide isolation from an untrustworthy operating system (OS). A trusted party verifies the software that runs in a TEE using remote attestation procedures. However, the publication of transient execution attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown revealed fundamental weaknesses in many TEE architectures, including Intel Software Guard Exentsions (SGX) and Arm TrustZone. These attacks can extract cryptographic secrets, thereby compromising the integrity of the remote attestation procedure. In this work, we design and develop a TEE architecture that provides remote attestation integrity protection even when confidentiality of the TEE is compromised. We use the formally verified seL4 microkernel to build the TEE, which ensures strong isolation and integrity. We offload cryptographic operations to a secure co-processor that does not share any vulnerable microarchitectural hardware units with the main processor, to protect against transient execution attacks. Our design guarantees integrity of the remote attestation procedure. It can be extended to leverage co-processors from Google and Apple, for wide-scale deployment on mobile devices. / Under de senaste åren används betrodda exekveringsmiljöer (TEE) allt mera i datorutrustning för att skydda säkerhetskritisk programvara från attacker och för att isolera dem från ett opålitligt operativsystem. En betrodd part verifierar programvaran som körs i en TEE med hjälp av fjärrattestering. Nyliga mikroarkitekturella anfall, t.ex. Spectre och Meltdown, har dock visat grundläggande svagheter i många TEE-arkitekturer, inklusive Intel SGX och Arm TrustZone. Dessa attacker kan avslöja kryptografiska hemligheter och därmed äventyra integriteten av fjärrattestning. I det här arbetet utvecklar vi en arkitektur för en betrodd exekveringsmiljö (TEE) som ger integritetsskydd genom fjärrattestering även när TEE:s konfidentialitet äventyras. Vi använder den formellt verifierade seL4-mikrokärnan för att bygga TEE:n som garanterar stark isolering och integritet. För att skydda kryptografiska operationer, overför vi dem till en säker samprocessor som inte delar någon sårbar mikroarkitektur med huvudprocessorn. Vår arktektur garanterar fjärrattesteringens integritet och kan utnyttja medprocessorer från Google och Apple för att användas i stor skala på mobila enheter.

The basis of today’s security systems is the trust and confidence that the system will behave as expected and are in a known good trusted state. The trust is built from hardware and software elements that generates a chain of trust that originates from a trusted known entity. Leveraging hardware, software and a mandatory access control policy technology is needed to create a trusted measurement environment. Employing a control layer (hypervisor or microkernel) with the ability to enforce a fine grained access control policy with hyper call granularity across multiple guest virtual domains can ensure that any malicious environment to be contained. In my research, I propose the use of radium's Asynchronous Root of Trust Measurement (ARTM) capability incorporated with a secure mandatory access control policy engine that would mitigate the limitations of the current hardware TPM solutions. By employing ARTM we can leverage asynchronous use of boot, launch, and use with the hypervisor proving its state and the integrity of the secure policy. My solution is using Radium (Race free on demand integrity architecture) architecture that will allow a more detailed measurement of applications at run time with greater semantic knowledge of the measured environments. Radium incorporation of a secure access control policy engine will give it the ability to limit or empower a virtual domain system. It can also enable the creation of a service oriented model of guest virtual domains that have the ability to perform certain operations such as introspecting other virtual domain systems to determine the integrity or system state and report it to a remote entity.

Network programming is one of the most important applications in Wireless Sensor Networks as It provides an efficient way to update program Images running on sensor nodes without physical access to them. Securing these updates, however, remains a challenging and important issue, given the open deployment environment of sensor nodes. Though several security schemes have been proposed to impose the authenticity and Integrity protection on network programming applications, they are either energy Inefficient as they tend to use digital signature or lacks the data confidentiality. In addition, due to the absence of secure memory management in the current sensor hardware, the attacker could inject malicious code into the program flash by exploiting buffer overflow In the memory despite the secure code dissemination. The contribution of this thesis Is to provide two software-based security protocols and one hardware-based remote attestation protocol for network programming application. Our first protocol deploys multiple one-way key chains for a multi-hop sensor network. The scheme Is shown to be lower In computational, power consumption and communication costs yet still able to secure multi??hop propagation of program images. Our second protocol utilizes an Iterative hash structure to the data packets in network programming application, ensuring the data confidentiality and authenticity. In addition, we Integrated confidentiality and DoS-attack-resistance in a multi??hop code dissemination protocol. Our final solution is a hardware-based remote attestation protocol for verification of running codes on sensor nodes. An additional piece of tamper-proof hardware, Trusted Platform Module (TPM), is imposed into the sensor nodes. It secures the sensitive information (e.g., the session key) from attackers and monitors any platform environment changes with the Internal registers. With these features of TPM, the code Injection attack could be detected and removed when the contaminated nodes are challenged in our remote attestation protocol. We implement the first two software-based protocols with Deluge as the reference network programming protocol in TinyOS, evaluate them with the extensive simulation using TOSSIM and validate the simulation results with experiments using Tmote. We implement the remote attestation protocol on Fleck, a sensor platform developed by CSIRO that Integrates an Atmel TPM chip.

Network programming is one of the most important applications in Wireless Sensor Networks as It provides an efficient way to update program Images running on sensor nodes without physical access to them. Securing these updates, however, remains a challenging and important issue, given the open deployment environment of sensor nodes. Though several security schemes have been proposed to impose the authenticity and Integrity protection on network programming applications, they are either energy Inefficient as they tend to use digital signature or lacks the data confidentiality. In addition, due to the absence of secure memory management in the current sensor hardware, the attacker could inject malicious code into the program flash by exploiting buffer overflow In the memory despite the secure code dissemination. The contribution of this thesis Is to provide two software-based security protocols and one hardware-based remote attestation protocol for network programming application. Our first protocol deploys multiple one-way key chains for a multi-hop sensor network. The scheme Is shown to be lower In computational, power consumption and communication costs yet still able to secure multi??hop propagation of program images. Our second protocol utilizes an Iterative hash structure to the data packets in network programming application, ensuring the data confidentiality and authenticity. In addition, we Integrated confidentiality and DoS-attack-resistance in a multi??hop code dissemination protocol. Our final solution is a hardware-based remote attestation protocol for verification of running codes on sensor nodes. An additional piece of tamper-proof hardware, Trusted Platform Module (TPM), is imposed into the sensor nodes. It secures the sensitive information (e.g., the session key) from attackers and monitors any platform environment changes with the Internal registers. With these features of TPM, the code Injection attack could be detected and removed when the contaminated nodes are challenged in our remote attestation protocol. We implement the first two software-based protocols with Deluge as the reference network programming protocol in TinyOS, evaluate them with the extensive simulation using TOSSIM and validate the simulation results with experiments using Tmote. We implement the remote attestation protocol on Fleck, a sensor platform developed by CSIRO that Integrates an Atmel TPM chip.

With recent advances in electronics and communication technologies, our daily lives are immersed in an environment of Internet-connected smart things. Despite the great convenience brought by the development of these technologies, privacy concerns and security issues are two topics that deserve more attention. On one hand, as smart things continue to grow in their abilities to sense the physical world and capabilities to send information out through the Internet, they have the potential to be used for surveillance of any individuals secretly. Nevertheless, people tend to adopt wearable devices without fully understanding what private information can be inferred and leaked through sensor data. On the other hand, security issues become even more serious and lethal with the world embracing the Internet of Things (IoT). Failures in computing systems are common, however, a failure now in IoT may harm people's lives. As demonstrated in both academic research and industrial practice, a software vulnerability hidden in a smart vehicle may lead to a remote attack that subverts a driver's control of the vehicle. Our approach to the aforementioned challenges starts by understanding privacy leakage in the IoT era and follows with adding defense layers to the IoT system with attackers gaining increasing capabilities. The first question we ask ourselves is "what new privacy concerns do IoT bring". We focus on discovering information leakage beyond people's common sense from even seemingly benign signals. We explore how much private information we can extract by designing information extraction systems. Through our research, we argue for stricter access control on newly coming sensors. After noticing the importance of data collected by IoT, we trace where sensitive data goes. In the IoT era, edge nodes are used to process sensitive data. However, a capable attacker may compromise edge nodes. Our second research focuses on applying trusted hardware to build trust in large-scale networks under this circumstance. The application of trusted hardware protects sensitive data from compromised edge nodes. Nonetheless, if an attacker becomes more powerful and embeds malicious logic into code for trusted hardware during the development phase, he still can secretly steal private data. In our third research, we design a static analyzer for detecting malicious logic hidden inside code for trusted hardware. Other than the privacy concern of data collected, another important aspect of IoT is that it affects the physical world. Our last piece of research work enables a user to verify the continuous execution state of an unmanned vehicle. This way, people can trust the integrity of the past and present state of the unmanned vehicle. / Doctor of Philosophy / The past few years have witnessed a rising in computing and networking technologies. Such advances enable the new paradigm, IoT, which brings great convenience to people's life. Large technology companies like Google, Apple, Amazon are creating smart devices such as smartwatch, smart home, drones, etc. Compared to the traditional internet, IoT can provide services beyond digital information by interacting with the physical world by its sensors and actuators. While the deployment of IoT brings value in various aspects of our society, the lucrative reward from cyber-crimes also increases in the upcoming IoT era. Two unique privacy and security concerns are emerging for IoT. On one hand, IoT brings a large volume of new sensors that are deployed ubiquitously and collect data 24/7. User's privacy is a big concern in this circumstance because collected sensor data may be used to infer a user's private activities. On the other hand, cyber-attacks now harm not only cyberspace but also the physical world. A failure in IoT devices could result in loss of human life. For example, a remotely hacked vehicle could shut down its engine on the highway regardless of the driver's operation. Our approach to emerging privacy and security concerns consists of two directions. The first direction targets at privacy protection. We first look at the privacy impact of upcoming ubiquitous sensing and argue for stricter access control on smart devices. Then, we follow the data flow of private data and propose solutions to protect private data from the networking and cloud computing infrastructure. The other direction aims at protecting the physical world. We propose an innovative method to verify the cyber state of IoT devices.