POSTER: LHSA: Lightweight Hardware Security Arbitrator

Abstract

Hardware security components provide a Root-of-Trust (RoT) environment for critical system operations and bring in a substantially high level of security guarantee since it is protected from various software-based vulnerabilities and side channel attacks. There are a few state-of-art hardware security components which are prevalent in modern digital devices such as crypto engines, key management cores, and random number generators among others. However, most hardware security components are not exposed to end-user applications and their usage and benefits are severely limited by the policies imposed by device vendors. The reason behind the strict restriction is to reduce the attack surface and harden the hardware security components. However, application is the most vulnerable attack surface and requires utmost protection. Hence, it is imperative to provide a secure mechanism through which applications can fully leverage the hardware security components. In this paper, we propose the Lightweight Hardware Security Arbitrator (LHSA) which opens up a path for applications to fully utilize hardware security components without jeopardizing hardware security hardening. LHSA creates virtualized hardware security components for each application and applications can utilize the full hardware security functionalities in a securely isolated environment. We have built a prototype using a commodity Windows platform on ARM SoC (System-on-Chip) environment and we demonstrate its practicality and security benefits.