Abstract
The ability to copy data effortlessly poses significant security issues in many applications; It is difficult to safely lend out music or e-books, virtual credits cannot be transferred between peers without contacting a central server or co-operation with other network nodes, …
Protecting digital copies is hard because of the huge software and hardware trusted computing base applications have to rely on. Protected-module architectures (PMAs) provide an interesting alternative by relying only on a minimal set of security primitives. Recently it has been proven that such platforms can provide strong security guarantees. However, transferring state of protected modules has, to the best of our knowledge, not yet been studied.
In this paper, we present a protocol to transfer protected modules from one machine to another state-continuously; From a high level point of view, only a single instance of the module exists that executes without interruption when it is transferred from one machine to another. In practice however an attacker may (i) crash the system at any point in time (i.e., a crash attack), (ii) present the system with a stale state (i.e., a rollback attack), or (iii) trick both machines to continue execution of the module (i.e., a forking attack). We also discuss use cases of such a system that go well beyond digital rights management.
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Strackx, R., Lambrigts, N. (2015). Idea: State-Continuous Transfer of State in Protected-Module Architectures. In: Piessens, F., Caballero, J., Bielova, N. (eds) Engineering Secure Software and Systems. ESSoS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8978. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15618-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15618-7_4
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