TY - GEN
T1 - A Practical Hardware-Assisted Approach to Customize Trusted Boot for Mobile Devices
AU - Gonzalez, Javier
AU - Hölzl, Michael
AU - Riedl, Peter
AU - Bonnet, Philippe
AU - Mayrhofer, René
N1 - ISBN 978-3-319-13256-3
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Current efforts to increase the security of the boot sequence for mobile devices fall into two main categories: (i) secure boot: where each stage in the boot sequence is evaluated, aborting the boot process if a non expected component attempts to be loaded; and (ii) trusted boot: where a log is maintained with the components that have been loaded in the boot process for later audit. The first approach is often criticized for locking down devices, thus reducing users’ freedom to choose software. The second lacks the mechanisms to enforce any form of run-time verification. In this paper, we present the architecture for a two-phase boot verification that addresses these shortcomings. In the first phase, at boot-time the integrity of the bootloader and OS images are verified and logged; in the second phase, at run-time applications can check the boot traces and verify that the running software satisfies their security requirements. This is a first step towards supporting usage control primitives for running applications. Our approach relies on off-the-shelf secure hardware that is available in a multitude of mobile devices: ARM TrustZone as a Trusted Execution Environment, and Secure Element as a tamper-resistant unit.
AB - Current efforts to increase the security of the boot sequence for mobile devices fall into two main categories: (i) secure boot: where each stage in the boot sequence is evaluated, aborting the boot process if a non expected component attempts to be loaded; and (ii) trusted boot: where a log is maintained with the components that have been loaded in the boot process for later audit. The first approach is often criticized for locking down devices, thus reducing users’ freedom to choose software. The second lacks the mechanisms to enforce any form of run-time verification. In this paper, we present the architecture for a two-phase boot verification that addresses these shortcomings. In the first phase, at boot-time the integrity of the bootloader and OS images are verified and logged; in the second phase, at run-time applications can check the boot traces and verify that the running software satisfies their security requirements. This is a first step towards supporting usage control primitives for running applications. Our approach relies on off-the-shelf secure hardware that is available in a multitude of mobile devices: ARM TrustZone as a Trusted Execution Environment, and Secure Element as a tamper-resistant unit.
KW - Secure boot
KW - Trusted boot
KW - Mobile device security
KW - Boot sequence verification
KW - Trusted Execution Environment
KW - Secure boot
KW - Trusted boot
KW - Mobile device security
KW - Boot sequence verification
KW - Trusted Execution Environment
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-13257-0_35
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-13257-0_35
M3 - Conference article
SN - 0302-9743
VL - 8783
SP - 542
EP - 554
JO - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
JF - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
ER -