Peter Špaček

Internet of Things connects the physical and cybernetic world. As such, security issues of IoT devices are especially damaging and need to be addressed. In this treatise, we overview current security issues of IoT with the perspective of future threats. We identify three main trends that need to be specifically addressed: security issues of the integration of IoT with cloud and blockchains, the rapid changes in cryptography due to quantum computing, and finally the rise of artificial intelligence and evolution methods in the scope of security of IoT. We give an overview of the identified threats and propose solutions for securing the IoT in the future.

Analytical security of cryptographic protocols does not immediately translate to operational security due to incorrect implementation and attacks targeting the execution environment. Code verification and hardware-based trusted execution solutions exist, however these leave it up to the implementer to assemble the complete solution, imposing a complete re-think of the hardware platforms and software development process. We rather aim for a comprehensive solution for secure cryptographic protocol execution, which takes the form of a trusted execution environment based on runtime verification and stock hardware security modules. RV-TEE can be deployed on existing platforms and protocol implementations. Runtime verification lends itself well at several conceptual levels of the execution environment, ranging from high level protocol properties, to lower level checks such as taint inference. The proposed architectural setup involving two runtime verification modules is instantiated through a case study using a popular web browser. We successfully monitor high and low level properties with promising results with respect to practicality.

BIKE suite of algorithms is one of the candidates in NIST call for public-key post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. It is a key-encapsulation mechanism based on QC-MDPC codes with purely ephemeral keys. The security device implementing such an algorithm therefore needs to generate multiple key pairs in its lifetime very efficiently. In our paper we explore the situation where BigBrother-type adversary can subtly corrupt the vendor(s) of the security devices (e.g., by altering the standard algorithms). In our model, BigBrother cannot preload the keys or synchronize the key generator by a covert channel, but is able to learn the secrets of security devices by observing the public execution of the KEM protocols. BigBrother typically obtains the secret through the usage of (masked) weak keys. However, we can also imagine other covert channels embedded into the ephemeral public keys by some unknown algorithm. To prevent these classes of attacks, we propose that the standard should explicitly specify a verifiable algorithm to transform the required key randomness into a set of keys.