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PublicationUniversal Remote Attestation for Cloud and Edge Platforms( 2023)With more computing workloads being shifted to the cloud, verifying the integrity of remote software stacks through remote attestation becomes an increasingly important topic. During remote attestation, a prover provides attestation evidence to a verifier, backed by a hardware trust anchor. While generating this information, which is essentially a list of hashes, is easy, examining the trustworthiness of the overall platform based on the provided list of hashes without context is difficult. Furthermore, as different trust anchors use different formats, interaction between devices using different attestation technologies is a complex problem. To address this problem, we propose a universal, hardware-agnostic device-identity and attestation framework. Our framework focuses on easing attestation by having provers present meaningful metadata to verify the integrity of the attestation evidence. We implemented and evaluated the framework for Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), AMD SEV-SNP attestation, and ARM PSA Entity Attestation Tokens (EATs).
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PublicationConfidential Quantum Computing( 2023)Quantum computing is becoming more accessible with increasing numbers of quantum platforms. The confidentiality and integrity of data and algorithms running on these systems are important assets that need to be protected from untrusted parties. Previous approaches focus on the encryption of individual sub-areas, often using at least hybrid clients, and do not take the entire path from the classical client via a platform to the quantum computing hardware into consideration. Based on the classification of quantum algorithms we show the assets worth protecting, evolve the data flow on third-party quantum hardware and quantum computing platforms, and propose a concept architecture addressing confidentiality and integrity of processed data and code. Our approach shows that confidentiality can already be achieved for data with classical clients, while code confidentiality remains an open question. Our approach covers integrity for most complexity classes.
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PublicationCoCoTPM: Trusted Platform Modules for Virtual Machines in Confidential Computing Environments( 2022)Cloud computing has gained popularity and is increasingly used to process sensitive and valuable data. This development necessitates the protection of data from the cloud provider and results in a trend towards confidential computing. Hardware-based technologies by AMD, Intel and Arm address this and allow the protection of virtual machines and the data processed in them. Unfortunately, these hardware-based technologies do not offer a unified interface for necessary tasks like secure key generation and usage or secure storage of integrity measurements. Moreover, these technologies are oftentimes limited in functionality especially regarding remote attestation. On the other hand, a unified interface is widely used in the area of bare-metal systems to provide these functionalities: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). In this paper, we present a concept for an architecture providing TPM functionalities for virtual machines in confidential computing environments. We name it Confidential Computing Trusted Platform Module, short CoCoTPM. Different from common approaches for virtual machines, host and hypervisor are not trusted and excluded from the trusted computing base. Our solution is compatible with existing mechanisms and tools utilizing TPMs and thus allows the protection of virtual machines in confidential computing environments without further adaptations of these mechanisms and tools. This includes storage of integrity measurements during a measured boot and for the integrity measurement architecture, full disk encryption bound to these measurements, usage of an openssl provider for TLS connections and remote attestation. We show how our concept can be applied to different hardware-specific technologies and implemented our concept for AMD SEV and SEV-SNP.
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PublicationBuilding trust in data spaces( 2022)Data is becoming increasingly valuable and must be protected. At the same time, data becomes an economic asset and companies can benefit from exchanging data with each other. The International Data Spaces enable companies to share data while ensuring data sovereignty and security. Data providers can keep control over the processing of their data by utilizing usage control policies, including the verification that these usage control policies are enforced by the data consumer. For this, data processing devices, called connectors, must prove their identity and the integrity of their software stack and state. In this chapter, we present the overall security concept for building trust in data spaces enabling data sovereignty and usage control enforcement. The concept builds on a certification process for components and operational environments utilizing the multiple eye principle. This process is technically mapped to a public key infrastructure providing digital certificates for connector identities and software signing. Finally, the third building block is the architecture and system security of the connectors where usage control must be enforced, the identity and integrity of other connectors and their software stack and state must be verified, and the actual data processing happens.
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PublicationGAIA-X and IDS(International Data Spaces Association, 2021)
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PatentVerfahren zur Verifikationsprüfung eines Sicherheitsdokuments mit einem gedruckten Sicherheitsmerkmal, Sicherheitsmerkmal und Anordnung zur Verifikation( 2019)Die vorliegende Erfindung betrifft ein Verfahren zur Authentizitäts- und/oder Integritäts-Prüfung eines Sicherheitsdokuments (01) mit einem gedruckten Sicherheitsmerkmal (02). Das Verfahren umfasst die Schritte: Bestrahlen des Sicherheitsdokuments (01) mit einer elektromagnetischen Strahlung, Aufnahme mehrerer Einzelbilder in zeitlich definierten Abständen mittels eines mobilen Endgerätes (06), Überprüfen der erfassten Einzelbilder mittels einer Datenverarbeitungseinheit und Ausgabe des Ergebnisses der Überprüfung. Weiterhin betrifft die Erfindung ein gedrucktes Sicherheitsmerkmal (02) für ein Sicherheitsdokument (01) sowie eine Anordnung zur Authentizitäts- und/oder Integritäts-Prüfung eines Sicherheitsdokuments (01).
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PublicationSEVered: Subverting AMD's virtual machine encryption( 2018)AMD SEV is a hardware feature designed for the secure encryption of virtual machines. SEV aims to protect virtual machine memory not only from other malicious guests and physical attackers, but also from a possibly malicious hypervisor. This relieves cloud and virtual server customers from fully trusting their server providers and the hypervisors they are using. We present the design and implementation of SEVered, an attack from a malicious hypervisor capable of extracting the full contents of main memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted virtual machines. SEVered neither requires physical access nor colluding virtual machines, but only relies on a remote communication service, such as a web server, running in the targeted virtual machine. We verify the effectiveness of SEVered on a recent A MD SEV-enabled server platform running different services, such as web or SSH servers, in encrypted virtual machines. With these examples, we demonstrate that SEVered reliably and efficiently extracts all memory contents even in scenarios where the targeted virtual machine is under high load.
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PublicationA Rapid Innovation Framework for Connected Mobility Applications(Fraunhofer ESK, 2018)Connected Mobility Applications help to continuously improve traffic safety and efficiency. Today, much time and effort have to be invested to bring an idea into a safe prototype and to finally launch a reliable product.Software development tools have to adapt to these requirements. They have to support a rapid and continuous development process, that allows to test and validate the distributed application as one overall system. When developing cooperative applications, a higher design complexity has to be handled, as components are distributed over heterogeneous systems that interact with a varying timing behavior and less data confidence. Also, test and validation become more complex. Our Innovation Framework is intended to rapidly bring an idea for a connected application into a prototype so the investment risk for innovative applications is reduced. In this whitepaper we describe the approach of a Rapid InnovationTool Kit that is intended to speed up the development process for connected mobility applications. Thereby, a safe and secure prototype is available at an early development phase to gain experience within field tests that help to rapidly improve the intended application. Our software tool kit is able to find deviations from the specified behaviour and also it can instantly locate and identify erroneous functions within distributed systems. Extensive security tests can then be applied on the implemented application to ensure a secure operation. Another use case for the described testbed is to evaluate communication technologies and to find the most suitable transmission technology for a certain application. For example, short range communication with the 802.11p WLAN technology or the upcoming LTE enhancement LTE-V2X are comparable within specific scenarios. This evaluation can help to reduce the investment risk for the deployment of connected applications.
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PublicationSafety & security testing of cooperative automotive systems( 2018)Cooperative behavior of automated traffic participants is one next step towards the goals of reducing the number of traffic fatalities and optimizing traffic flow. The notification of a traffic participant's intentions and coordination of driving strategies increase the reaction time for safety functions and allow a foresighted maneuver planning. When developing cooperative applications, a higher design complexity has to be handled, as components are distributed over heterogeneous systems that interact with a varying timing behavior and less data confidence. In this paper, we present a solution for the development, simulation and validation of cooperative automotive systems together with an exemplary development flow for safety and security testing.
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PublicationTransCrypt: Transparent main memory encryption using a minimal ARM hypervisor( 2017)Attacks on memory, revealing secrets, for example, via DMA or cold boot, are a long known problem. In this paper, we present TransCrypt, a concept for transparent and guest-agnostic, dynamic kernel and user main memory encryption using a custom minimal hypervisor. The concept utilizes the address translation features provided by hardware-based virtualization support of modern CPUs to restrict the guest to a small working set of recently accessed physical pages. The rest of the pages, which constitute the majority of memory, remain securely encrypted. Furthermore, we present a transparent and guest-agnostic mechanism for recognizing pages to be excluded from encryption to still ensure correct system functionality, for example, for pages shared with peripheral devices. The detailed evaluation using our fully functional prototype on an ARM Cortex-A15 development board running Android shows that TransCrypt is able to effectively protect secrets in memory while keeping the p erformance impact small. For example, the system is able to keep the E-mail account password of a typical user in the Android mail app's memory encrypted 98.99% of the time, while still reaching 81.7% and 99.8% of native performance in different benchmarks.
