research-article

Soteria: Offline Software Protection within Low-cost Embedded Devices

Authors:

Johannes Götzfried,

Ruan de Clercq,

Felix Freiling,

Ingrid VerbauwhedeAuthors Info & Claims

ACSAC '15: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Pages 241 - 250

https://doi.org/10.1145/2818000.2856129

Published: 07 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Protecting the intellectual property of software that is distributed to third-party devices which are not under full control of the software author is difficult to achieve on commodity hardware today. Modern techniques of reverse engineering such as static and dynamic program analysis with system privileges are increasingly powerful, and despite possibilities of encryption, software eventually needs to be processed in clear by the CPU. To anyhow be able to protect software on these devices, a small part of the hardware must be considered trusted. In the past, general purpose trusted computing bases added to desktop computers resulted in costly and rather heavyweight solutions. In contrast, we present Soteria, a lightweight solution for low-cost embedded systems. At its heart, Soteria is a program-counter based memory access control extension for the TI MSP430 microprocessor. Based on our open implementation of Soteria as an openMSP430 extension, and our FPGA-based evaluation, we show that the proposed solution has a minimal performance, size and cost overhead while effectively protecting the confidentiality and integrity of an application's code against all kinds of software attacks including attacks from the system level.

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Cited By

Bognar MVan Bulck JPiessens F(2022)Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833735(1638-1655)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833735
Cano-Quiveu GRuiz-de-clavijo-Vazquez PBellido MJuan-Chico JViejo-Cortes JGuerrero-Martos DOstua-Aranguena E(2021)Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS): A Hardware Solution to IoT SecurityElectronics10.3390/electronics1023303610:23(3036)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2021
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Wang ZXie WWang BTao JWang E(2021)A Survey on Recent Advanced Research of CPS SecurityApplied Sciences10.3390/app1109375111:9(3751)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/app11093751
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Soteria: Offline Software Protection within Low-cost Embedded Devices

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ACSAC '15: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2015

489 pages

ISBN:9781450336826

DOI:10.1145/2818000

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 07 December 2015

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ACSAC 2015: 2015 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 7 - 11, 2015

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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Cited By

Bognar MVan Bulck JPiessens F(2022)Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833735(1638-1655)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833735
Cano-Quiveu GRuiz-de-clavijo-Vazquez PBellido MJuan-Chico JViejo-Cortes JGuerrero-Martos DOstua-Aranguena E(2021)Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS): A Hardware Solution to IoT SecurityElectronics10.3390/electronics1023303610:23(3036)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10233036
Wang ZXie WWang BTao JWang E(2021)A Survey on Recent Advanced Research of CPS SecurityApplied Sciences10.3390/app1109375111:9(3751)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/app11093751
Busi MNoorman JVan Bulck JGalletta LDegano PMühlberg JPiessens F(2021)Securing Interruptible Enclaved Execution on Small MicroprocessorsACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/347053443:3(1-77)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3470534
Chi HLee KJao T(2021)Lightweight Hardware-Based Memory Protection Mechanism on IoT Processors2021 IEEE 30th Asian Test Symposium (ATS)10.1109/ATS52891.2021.00015(13-18)Online publication date: Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ATS52891.2021.00015
Kim HLee JPratama DAwaludin AKim HKwon DXie Y(2020)RIMIProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/3400302.3415727(1-9)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3400302.3415727
Busi MNoorman JBulck JGalletta LDegano PMuhlberg JPiessens F(2020)Provably Secure Isolation for Interruptible Enclaved Execution on Small Microprocessors2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF49147.2020.00026(262-276)Online publication date: Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF49147.2020.00026
Maene PGotzfried JMuller Tde Clercq RFreiling FVerbauwhede I(2019)Atlas: Application Confidentiality in Compromised Embedded SystemsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2018.285825716:3(415-423)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2018.2858257
Dinu DKhrishnan ASchaumont P(2019)SIA: Secure Intermittent Architecture for Off-the-Shelf Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers2019 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)10.1109/HST.2019.8740834(208-217)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/HST.2019.8740834
Van Bulck JPiessens FStrackx RLie DMannan MBackes MWang X(2018)NemesisProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3243734.3243822(178-195)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
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