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Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]

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31–34 of 34 posts

Re: Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]

#31
post #22

How feasible would it be to bombard the enclave with radiation, low enough to avoid any physical damage to the silicon, but high enough to cause random glitches in computation.

To flip bits, you'd generally want to use radiation with a high local energy deposition such as alpha particles or heavy ions. With typical photon radiation (X-Rays or gammas from radioactive decay) you'll mostly just degrade the silicon until it stops working reliably overall, and not change data.

As the secure enclave's surface is much smaller than the application processor's you'd also have to focus your protons/alphas/heavy ions very well, because otherwise you'd affect the logic outside of the secure element much more often.

I think this approach in practice is much, much harder than to just shine any random radioactive source on it.

Re: Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]

#32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure I follow. Can you outline a hypothetical in which there is a practical risk, so I know what you're talking about? Obviously, neither of us have all the technical details, so just propose something.

I didn't have any attack in particular, but an example could be sending a long buffer to the kernel that causes an integer overflow and overwrites some important memory. Especially with the non-verified external RAM it seems like you could throw some weird stuff at the kernel.

You cannot "send a long buffer to the (l4) kernel".

You would know this if you had read the available documentation. 8)

Re: Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]

#33
If anyone is interested in a less technical, architecture overview of the Secure Enclave, I've written a blog series with the intent of reaching a more relaxed audience who is still concerned about their mobile security. The blog can be found here: https://woumn.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/security-principles-i...

I always welcome feedback! :^)

Re: Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]

#34
post #24

Very nice design. I'm especially impressed they went with L4. For those who may not be aware, seL4 has been formally verified using COQ.

seems like a natural pick, no? The OS for the TEE from Trustonic is based on L4 since around 2010 ("mobicore" from G&D).
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