Hardware-Assisted Security: Promises, Pitfalls and Opportunities

Hardware security architectures and primitives are becoming increasingly important in practice providing trust anchors and trusted execution environment to protect modern IT systems, and particularly secure the insecure legacy software. Emerging applications, for instance in IoT area, increasingly involve large numbers of connected and heterogeneous device swarms and pose crucial security and privacy challenges on the underlying devices. Over the past two decades we have seen various hardware security solutions and trends in practice from Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), ARM's TrustZone, and Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), to very recent advances such as Intel's Software Guard Extension (SGX) and Control-Flow Enforcement technology (CET). However, despite their advantages these solutions are rarely used by third party developers, make strong trust assumptions about manufacturers, are too expensive for small constrained devices, do not easily scale, or suffer from information leakage. In this talk we will discuss the real-world impact of hardware-based security solutions, their strengths and shortcomings as well as new research directions.