Programmability is a double-edged sword. It can better tailor solutions to problems, optimize resource use, and inexpensively patch deployed equipment. But programmability can also be abused to undermine the security of hardware and that of its unwitting users. Remote Attestation (RA) is a class of techniques to provide integrity assurance to remote users of resources such as hardware, OSs and applications. It is used to establish well-defined trust relationships among mutually distrustful principals who provide, use or delegate remote resources. RA could benefit, for example, tenants of a data-center or users of IoT equipment such as health monitors.

With the emergence of Internet of Things, mobile devices are generating more network traffic than ever. TrustZone is a hardware-enabled trusted execution environment for ARM processors. While TrustZone is effective in providing the much-needed memory isolation, we observe that it is possible to derive secret information from secure world using the cache contention, due to its high-performance cache sharing design. In this work, we propose TruSense to study the timing-based cache side-channel information leakage of TrustZone. TruSense can be launched from not only the normal world operating system but also a non-privileged user application. Without access to virtual-to-physical address mapping in user applications, we devise a novel method that uses the expected channel statistics to allocate memory for cache probing. We also show how an attacker might use the less accurate performance event interface as a timer. Using the T-table based AES implementation in OpenSSL 1.0.1f as an example, we demonstrate how a normal world attacker can steal fine-grained secret in the secure world. We also discuss possible mitigations for the information leakage.

Trustworthy software requires strong privacy and security guarantees from a secure trust base in hardware. While chipmakers provide hardware support for basic security and privacy primitives such as enclaves and memory encryption. these primitives do not address hiding of the memory access pattern, information about which may enable attacks on the system or reveal characteristics of sensitive user data. State-of-the-art approaches to protecting the access pattern are largely based on Oblivious RAM (ORAM). Unfortunately, current ORAM implementations suffer from very significant practicality and overhead concerns, including roughly an order of magnitude slowdown, more than 100% memory capacity overheads, and the potential for system deadlock.

To effectively participate in modern coalitions, member organizations must be able to share specific data and functionality with coalition partners, while ensuring that their resources are safe from inappropriate access. This requires access control models, policies, and enforcement mechanisms for coalition resources. This paper describes a family of coalition-based access control (CBAC) models, developed to provide a range of expressivity with an accompanying range of implementation complexity. We define the protection state of a system, which provides the semantics of CBAC-based access policies. Finally, we briefly examine some of the issues for coalition access policy development and administration, and them complexity of implementing access enforcement mechanisms in a coalition environment.

The Secure Virtual Enclaves (SVE) collaboration infrastructure allows multiple organizations to share their distributed application objects, while respecting organizational autonomy over local resources. The infrastructure is transparent to applications, which may be accessed via a web server, or may be based on Java or Microsoft's DCOM. The SVE infrastructure is implemented in middleware, with no modifications to COTS operating systems or network protocols. The system enables dynamic updates to security policies to support changes in both coalition membership and participants' perception of risks. While the prototype demonstrates fine-grained access control for secure collaborative computing, we have identified significant issues that remain to be addressed, particularly in the area of policy development, before such collaboration will be convenient. The SVE infrastructure offers a platform and conceptual basis for further exploration of these issues and experimentation with new solutions.

The authors define a relation, 'affects', between every pair of events based on a relation 'locally affects' for each process between each pair of events on the process. A mechanism for timestamping events is defined such that 'affects' relation, and so potential concurrency, between events can be inferred from their timestamps. A timestamping mechanism is presented such that potential concurrency can be inferred partially/completely and the extent of such inferring depends on the costs associated with the mechanism. Inferring 'affects' relationship can be used for debugging and for inferring potential concurrency between events in traces of executions.>