Hardware-rooted trust for secure key management and transient trust

We propose minimalist new hardware additions to a microprocessor chip that protect cryptographic keys in portable computing devices which are used in the field but owned by a central authority. Our authority-mode architecture has trust rooted in two critical secrets: a Device Root Key and a Storage Root Hash, initialized in the device by the trusted authority. Our architecture protects trusted software, bound to the device, which can use the root secrets to protect other sensitive information for many different usage scenarios. We describe a detailed usage scenario for crisis response, where first responders are given transient access to third-party sensitive information which can be securely accessed during a crisis and reliably revoked after the crisis is over. We leverage the Concealed Execution Mode of our earlier user-mode SP (Secret-Protecting) architecture to protect trusted code and its execution [1]. We call our new architecture authority-mode SP since it shares the same a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Jeffrey S. Dwoskin, Ruby B. Lee
• Keywords: Architecture, CCS 2007, Root Key, Security Privacy, User-mode Sp