HOACS: Homomorphic Obfuscation Assisted Concealing of Secrets to Thwart Trojan Attacks in COTS Processor

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hossain, Tanvir, Showers, Matthew, Hasan, Mahmudul, Hoque, Tamzidul
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Hossain, Tanvir
Showers, Matthew
Hasan, Mahmudul
Hoque, Tamzidul
author_facet Hossain, Tanvir
Showers, Matthew
Hasan, Mahmudul
Hoque, Tamzidul
contents Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components are often preferred over custom Integrated Circuits (ICs) to achieve reduced system development time and cost, easy adoption of new technologies, and replaceability. Unfortunately, the integration of COTS components introduces serious security concerns. None of the entities in the COTS IC supply chain are trusted from a consumer's perspective, leading to a ''zero trust'' threat model. Any of these entities could introduce hidden malicious circuits or hardware Trojans within the component, allowing an attacker in the field to extract secret information (e.g., cryptographic keys) or cause a functional failure. Existing solutions to counter hardware Trojans are inapplicable in such a zero-trust scenario as they assume either the design house or the foundry to be trusted and consider the design to be available for either analysis or modification. In this work, we have proposed a software-oriented countermeasure to ensure the confidentiality of secret assets against hardware Trojans that can be seamlessly integrated in existing COTS microprocessors. The proposed solution does not require any supply chain entity to be trusted and does not require analysis or modification of the IC design. To protect secret assets in an untrusted microprocessor, the proposed method leverages the concept of residue number coding (RNC) to transform the software functions operating on the asset to be fully homomorphic. We have implemented the proposed solution to protect the secret key within the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) program and presented a detailed security analysis. We also have developed a plugin for the LLVM compiler toolchain that automatically integrates the solution in AES. Finally, we compare the execution time overhead of the operations in the RNC-based technique with comparable homomorphic solutions and demonstrate significant improvement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_09701
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HOACS: Homomorphic Obfuscation Assisted Concealing of Secrets to Thwart Trojan Attacks in COTS Processor
Hossain, Tanvir
Showers, Matthew
Hasan, Mahmudul
Hoque, Tamzidul
Cryptography and Security
Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components are often preferred over custom Integrated Circuits (ICs) to achieve reduced system development time and cost, easy adoption of new technologies, and replaceability. Unfortunately, the integration of COTS components introduces serious security concerns. None of the entities in the COTS IC supply chain are trusted from a consumer's perspective, leading to a ''zero trust'' threat model. Any of these entities could introduce hidden malicious circuits or hardware Trojans within the component, allowing an attacker in the field to extract secret information (e.g., cryptographic keys) or cause a functional failure. Existing solutions to counter hardware Trojans are inapplicable in such a zero-trust scenario as they assume either the design house or the foundry to be trusted and consider the design to be available for either analysis or modification. In this work, we have proposed a software-oriented countermeasure to ensure the confidentiality of secret assets against hardware Trojans that can be seamlessly integrated in existing COTS microprocessors. The proposed solution does not require any supply chain entity to be trusted and does not require analysis or modification of the IC design. To protect secret assets in an untrusted microprocessor, the proposed method leverages the concept of residue number coding (RNC) to transform the software functions operating on the asset to be fully homomorphic. We have implemented the proposed solution to protect the secret key within the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) program and presented a detailed security analysis. We also have developed a plugin for the LLVM compiler toolchain that automatically integrates the solution in AES. Finally, we compare the execution time overhead of the operations in the RNC-based technique with comparable homomorphic solutions and demonstrate significant improvement.
title HOACS: Homomorphic Obfuscation Assisted Concealing of Secrets to Thwart Trojan Attacks in COTS Processor
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09701