Secure embedded system hardware design - A flexible security and trust enhanced approach
Computers and Electrical Engineering
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Mobile agent systems (MAS) suffer from security holes that in a crisisdisaster management system can be fatal. Trusted computing group's TPM chip can be used to solve the problem but only partially. The extreme physical conditions and particularities of the crisis management agent platform do not permit the full exploitation of the TPM's features. To solve this problem the use of a special purpose hardware module, physically connected to a host crisis management device as a local trusted third party, has been proposed. In this paper, we analyze the functionality and structure of such a hardware module, called Autonomous Attestation Token (AAT) and show how a successful attack can be launched on it. To counter this attack, we propose a more sophisticated key release protocol for the communication between the AAT and the host device. This is achieved by securing the communication channel between the two devices. Also, a detailed hardware structure of the AAT is proposed. This hardware structure support the proposed key release protocol. To further analyze this, we identify the basic operations needed by the AAT hardware components and propose a sequence of actions and associated signals that those components need to follow to support those operation.