Abstract
With the flourish of applications based on the internet of things and cloud computing, privacy issues have been attracting a lot of attentions. Although the increasing use of full disk encryption (FDE) significantly hamper privacy leakage and digital forensics, cold boot attacks have thwarted FDE since forensic recovery of scrambled telephones (FROST), a forensic tool, is proposed. The cryptographic keys which are stored in the mobile devices are inclined to be obtained by FROST. Recent research results have shown CPU-bound encryption methods to resist FROST. However, these methods performs AES encryption solely on CPU registers, whose advantage comes at the cost of encryption speed. This paper, therefore, presents a cryptographic key protection scheme for android devices which prevents FROST from acquiring the key of AES by changing storage location of the key in memory. The storage location of the key is switched to the fixed position where command line parameters will be stored when android boots. Therefore, the key will be covered by command line parameters while the system reboots, which negates FROST from obtaining the key. Compared with the popular CPU-bound encryption methods, our method has less impact on encryption efficiency and employs no additional storage resources.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Gupta, B.B., Agrawal, D.P., Yamaguchi, S.: Handbook of Research on Modern Cryptographic Solutions for Computer and Cyber Security. IGI Global, Hershey (2016)
Xu, M., Song, C., Ji, Y., Shih, M.-W., Lu, K., Zheng, C., Duan, R., Jang, Y., Lee, B., Qian, C., et al.: Toward engineering a secure android ecosystem: a survey of existing techniques. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 49(2), 38 (2016)
Sufatrio, Darell, J.J., Chua, T.-W., Thing, V.L.L.: Securing android: a survey, taxonomy, and challenges. ACM Comput. Surv. 47(4), 1–45 (2015)
Rastogi, S., Bhushan, K., Gupta, B.B.: Android applications repackaging detection techniques for smartphone devices. Proced. Comput. Sci. 78, 26–32 (2016)
Sharma, K., Gupta, B.B.: Multi-layer defense against malware attacks on smartphone wi-fi access channel. Proced. Comput. Sci. 78, 19–25 (2016)
Zhu, R., Tan, Y., Zhang, Q., Wu, F., Zheng, J., Xue, Y.: Determining image base of firmware files for arm devices. IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst. 99(2), 351–359 (2016)
Zhu, R., Tan, Y., Zhang, Q., Li, Y., Zheng, Jun: Determining image base of firmware for arm devices by matching literal pools. Digit. Invest. 16, 19–28 (2016)
Müller, T., Spreitzenbarth, M.: Frost. In: International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security, pp. 373–388. Springer, New York (2013)
Carbone, R., Bean, C., Salois, M.: An in-depth analysis of the cold boot attack. DRDC Valcartier, Defence Research and Development, Canada, Tech. Rep. (2011)
Gruhn, M., Müller, T.: On the practicability of cold boot attacks. In: Eighth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), 2013, pp. 390–397. IEEE (2013)
Zidlicky, R.: Re: the cold-boot attack—a paper tiger? www.spinics.net/lists/crypto/msg04668.html (2008). Accessed 30 Oct 2016
Müller, T., Dewald, A., Freiling, F.C.: Aesse: a cold-boot resistant implementation of aes. In: Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on System Security, pp. 42–47. ACM (2010)
Simmons, P.: Security through amnesia: a software-based solution to the cold boot attack on disk encryption. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 73–82. ACM (2011)
Müller, T., Freiling, F.C., Dewald, A.: Tresor runs encryption securely outside ram. In: USENIX Security Symposium, vol. 17 (2011)
Müller, T., Taubmann, B., Freiling, F.C.: Trevisor. In: International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security, pp. 66–83. Springer (2012)
Götzfried, J., Müller, T.: Armored: Cpu-bound encryption for android-driven arm devices. In: Eighth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES) 2013, pp. 161–168. IEEE (2013)
Nilsson, A., Andersson, M., Axelsson, S.: Key-hiding on the arm platform. Digit. Invest. 11, S63–S67 (2014)
Henson, M., Taylor, S.: Memory encryption: a survey of existing techniques. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 46(4), 53 (2014)
McGregor, P., Hollebeek, T., Volynkin, A., White, M.: Braving the cold: new methods for preventing cold boot attacks on encryption keys. In: Black Hat Security Conference, Las Vegas (2008)
TCG.: Tcg platform reset attack mitigation specification. https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/resources/pc_client_work_group_platform_reset_attack_mitigation_specification_version_10/ (2008). Accessed 30 Oct 2016
Gutmann, P.: Data remanence in semiconductor devices. In: Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, vol. 10. USENIX Association (2001)
Halderman, J.A., Schoen, S.D., Heninger, N., Clarkson, W., Paul, W., Calandrino, J.A., Feldman, A.J., Appelbaum, J., Felten, E.W.: Lest we remember: cold-boot attacks on encryption keys. Commun. ACM 52(5), 91–98 (2009)
Saout, C.: dm-crypt: a device-mapper crypto target. http://www.saout.de/misc/dm-crypt/ (2011). Accessed 30 Oct 2016
Google.: Encryption. https://source.android.com/security/encryption/ (2016). Accessed 30 Oct 2016
Beniamini, G.: Extracting qualcomm’s keymaster keys—breaking android full disk encryption. https://bits-please.blogspot.jp/2016/06/extracting_qualcomms_keymaster_keys.html (2016). Accessed 30 Oct 2016
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61370063) and Special Program for Applied Research on Super Computation of the NSFC-Guangdong Joint Fund (the second phase).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, X., Tan, Ya., Xue, Y. et al. Cryptographic key protection against FROST for mobile devices. Cluster Comput 20, 2393–2402 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-016-0721-3
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-016-0721-3