Analysis of Hardware Rooted Security System Implementation in Mobile Devices

Abstract

In today’s world of advanced Internet, mobility is a key service. The use of smart phones, tablets and wearable devices is on the rise at fast pace. However, traditional software-based security solutions are unable to deliver the satisfactory level of protection and security assurances to the mobile device users especially in enterprise, government and military. In recent past, mobile industry has made efforts to standardize the security specifications. The standards from National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and Trusted computing Group (TCG); Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2, Trusted Platform Module 2.0 and Mobile Trusted Module; have been analyzed and found that software based mobile security standards are unable to provide the basis of strong foundation required to implement mobile security as compared to the hardware rooted security mechanisms. Therefore, the standards for mobile devices need to be revised to overcome the inherit shortcomings. It was found that majority of the mobile security solutions were based on ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) that offer TrustZone security architecture with the vendors’ specific solutions mounted on it. The integrated solution of ARM TrustZone does not comply with the available standards, and hence, several security vulnerabilities have also been reported. As all the hardware rooted security solutions are vendor specific, closed form and non-standardized a new mobile security model mobile Trusted Platform Module (mTPM) has been proposed. An effort has been done to comprehensively cover conceptual framework over existing standards and their corresponding implementation methodology. mTPM suggests the hardware rooted security implementation technique on the existing ARM TrustZone security technology while overcoming its shortcoming especially pertaining to lack of secure hardware peripherals including establishing the integrity of various roots of trust for processing, storage, entropy source, clock, and access to firmware. Fundamentally it could be considered as embedding a TPM hardware device in ARM SoC by suitable augmenting the existing architecture with additional hardware and software resources. It is hoped that the proposed mTPM model will provide a unified, vendor neutral and standardized security platform for the mobile device manufacturers. However, it is felt that the whole concept should be subjected to physical testing and evaluation on a test bed through fabrication of prototype SoC.