research-article

Keys in the Clouds: Auditable Multi-device Access to Cryptographic Credentials

Authors:

Arseny Kurnikov,

Mohammad Mannan,

N. AsokanAuthors Info & Claims

ARES '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

Article No.: 40, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3230833.3234518

Published: 27 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Personal cryptographic keys are the foundation of many secure services, but storing these keys securely is a challenge, especially if they are used from multiple devices. Storing keys in a centralized location, like an Internet-accessible server, raises serious security concerns (e.g. server compromise). Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a well-known solution for protecting sensitive data in untrusted environments, and are now becoming available on commodity server platforms.

Although the idea of protecting keys using a server-side TEE is straight-forward, in this paper we validate this approach and show that it enables new desirable functionality. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a TEE-based Cloud Key Store (CKS), an online service for securely generating, storing, and using personal cryptographic keys. Using remote attestation, users receive strong assurance about the behaviour of the CKS, and can authenticate themselves using passwords while avoiding typical risks of password-based authentication like password theft or phishing. In addition, this design allows users to i) define policy-based access controls for keys; ii) delegate keys to other CKS users for a specified time and/or a limited number of uses; and iii) audit all key usages via a secure audit log. We have implemented a proof of concept CKS using Intel SGX and integrated this into GnuPG on Linux and OpenKeychain on Android. Our CKS implementation performs approximately 6,000 signature operations per second on a single desktop PC. The latency is in the same order of magnitude as using locally-stored keys, and 20x faster than smart cards.

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Cited By

Hong SKim BMannan MLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)Poster: Detecting Ransomware Attacks by Analyzing Replicated Block Snapshots Using Neural NetworksProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3691399(5000-5002)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3691399
Briongos SKarame GSoriente CWilde A(2023)No Forking Way: Detecting Cloning Attacks on Intel SGX ApplicationsProceedings of the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3627106.3627187(744-758)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627106.3627187
Berlato SMorelli UCarbone RRanise S(2022)End-to-End Protection of IoT Communications Through Cryptographic Enforcement of Access Control PoliciesData and Applications Security and Privacy XXXVI10.1007/978-3-031-10684-2_14(236-255)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-10684-2_14
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Index Terms

Keys in the Clouds: Auditable Multi-device Access to Cryptographic Credentials
1. Security and privacy

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ARES '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 2018

603 pages

ISBN:9781450364485

DOI:10.1145/3230833

Copyright © 2018 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: 27 August 2018

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ARES 2018

ARES 2018: International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 27 - 30, 2018

Hamburg, Germany

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ARES '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 128 of 260 submissions, 49%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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Cited By

Hong SKim BMannan MLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)Poster: Detecting Ransomware Attacks by Analyzing Replicated Block Snapshots Using Neural NetworksProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3691399(5000-5002)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3691399
Briongos SKarame GSoriente CWilde A(2023)No Forking Way: Detecting Cloning Attacks on Intel SGX ApplicationsProceedings of the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3627106.3627187(744-758)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627106.3627187
Berlato SMorelli UCarbone RRanise S(2022)End-to-End Protection of IoT Communications Through Cryptographic Enforcement of Access Control PoliciesData and Applications Security and Privacy XXXVI10.1007/978-3-031-10684-2_14(236-255)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-10684-2_14
Berlato SCarbone RLee ARanise S(2021)Formal Modelling and Automated Trade-off Analysis of Enforcement Architectures for Cryptographic Access Control in the CloudACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/347405625:1(1-37)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3474056
Nishide T(2020)One-Time Delegation of Unlinkable Signing Rights and Its ApplicationProvable and Practical Security10.1007/978-3-030-62576-4_6(103-123)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-62576-4_6
You WChen B(2020)Proofs of Ownership on Encrypted Cloud Data via Intel SGXApplied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-61638-0_22(400-416)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-61638-0_22

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