Arm PSA-Certified IoT Chip Security: A Case Study

Abstract

With the large scale adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in people's lives and industrial manufacturing processes, IoT security has become an important problem today. IoT security significantly relies on the security of the underlying hardware chip, which often contains critical information, such as encryption key.To understand existing IoT chip security, this study analyzes the security of an IoT security chip that has obtained an Arm Platform Security Architecture (PSA) Level 2 certification. Our analysis shows that the chip leaks part of the encryption key and presents a considerable security risk. Specifically, we use commodity equipment to collect electromagnetic traces of the chip. Using a statistical T-test, we find that the target chip has physical leakage during the AES encryption process. We further use correlation analysis to locate the detailed encryption interval in the collected electromagnetic trace for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption operation. On the basis of the intermediate value correlation analysis, we recover half of the 16-byte AES encryption key. We repeat the process for three different tests; in all the tests, we obtain the same result, and we recover around 8 bytes of the 16-byte AES encryption key. Therefore, experimental results indicate that despite the Arm PSA Level 2 certification, the target security chip still suffers from physical leakage. Upper layer application developers should impose strong security mechanisms in addition to those of the chip itself to ensure IoT application security.

Testing Resource Isolation for System-on-Chip Architectures

“…Figure 1 shows the behaviors of a source (on the left) and a target (on the right) as two communicating symbolic automata, focusing on the executed actions and hiding all concrete data as well as security and privilege levels. 5 Both automata synchronize their transitions with identical labels; we omitted the transition corresponding to a change of the source configuration, because it is the only unsynchronized transition.…”

“…Before certifying an SoC by ARM, industrial manufacturers are concerned about representing and testing resource isolation for themselves (the case study [5] showed that ARM-Certified Level 2 may leak confidential information such as AES encryption keys). Resource isolation should ensure that data contained in an IP (Intellectual Property, as are components usually called in the hardware community) protected with given security and privilege levels can only be accessed by an IP with corresponding or higher levels.…”

“…There are more complex communication protocols enabling a source to initiate further transactions with other targets, but this requires more than one interconnect 5. Taking them into account would yield unreadable figures: for instance, the source automaton would have as many different central ( idle ) states as there are different combinations of security and privilege levels (i.e., sixteen).…”

Optimizing QoS and security in agriculture IoT deployments: A bioinspired Q-learning model with customized shards

“…The vast majority of Internet of Things devices are deployed in uncontrolled settings in order to collect and monitor data about connected physical or digital objects. The amount of storage capacity they have, the processing power they have, and the rates at which they can transfer data are all constrained [ 10 ]. In addition, the devices and networking protocols used by these systems are quite diverse.…”

“…This implies that all devices are identified, connected, and approved by means of an architecture that is powered by a massively powerful cloud server. Alternately, the growing magnitude, complexity of network and cloud infrastructures is contributing to an increase in the cost of centralized AIoT systems [ [10] , [11] , [12] ]. An additional layer of complexity is introduced whenever there is a growing need for data to be interoperable, immutable, and verifiable when it is being traded across AIoT networks that include several parties.…”