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European Symposium on Research in Computer Security

ESORICS 2019: Computer Security – ESORICS 2019 pp 412–438Cite as

OCRAM-Assisted Sensitive Data Protection on ARM-Based Platform

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11736))

Abstract

On mobile devices, security-sensitive tasks (e.g., mobile payment, one-time password) involve not only sensitive data such as cryptographic keying material, but also sensitive I/O operations such as inputting PIN code via touchscreen and showing the authentication verification code on the display. Therefore, a comprehensive protection of these services should enforce a Trusted User Interface (TUI) to protect the sensitive user inputs and system outputs, in addition to preventing both software attacks and physical memory disclosure attacks. In this paper, we present an On-Chip RAM (OCRAM) assisted sensitive data protection mechanism named Oath on ARM-based platform to protect the sensitive data, particularly, sensitive I/O data, against both software attacks and physical memory disclosure attacks. The basic idea is to store and process the sensitive data in the OCRAM that is only accessible to the TrustZone secure world. After figuring out how to enable TrustZone protection for iRAM, we develop a trusted user interface with an OCRAM allocation mechanism to efficiently share the OCRAM between the secure OS and the rich OS. A prototype implemented on the OP-TEE system shows that Oath works well and has a small system overhead.

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Acknowledgment

This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2016YFB0800102 and No. 2017YFB0802401, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61802398, the National Cryptography Development Fund under Award No. MMJJ20180222 and MMJJ20170215, the U.S. ONR grants N00014-16-1-3214 and N00014-16-1-3216, and the NSF grants CNS-1815650.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Dawei Chu, Yuewu Wang, Lingguang Lei & Yanchu Li

  2. Data Assurance and Communication Security Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Dawei Chu, Yuewu Wang, Lingguang Lei & Yanchu Li

  3. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Dawei Chu, Yuewu Wang, Lingguang Lei & Yanchu Li

  4. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jiwu Jing

  5. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA

    Kun Sun

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  1. Dawei Chu
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  2. Yuewu Wang
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  4. Yanchu Li
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Correspondence to Lingguang Lei .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NEC Corporation, Kawasaki, Japan

    Kazue Sako

  2. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Steve Schneider

  3. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter Y. A. Ryan

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Chu, D., Wang, Y., Lei, L., Li, Y., Jing, J., Sun, K. (2019). OCRAM-Assisted Sensitive Data Protection on ARM-Based Platform. In: Sako, K., Schneider, S., Ryan, P. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2019. ESORICS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11736. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29962-0_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29962-0_20

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