Here is my personal take on this: you have to do your threat assessment to find 
out what attacks you care about. This will determine your hardware requirements 
(not the other way around). At a minimum you will have to figure out how to 
provide randomness in your design and that can come at a very low cost. For 
example, if I use ST's MCU finder 
http://www.st.com/en/development-tools/st-mcu-finder.html and search for 
microcontrollers that have TRNG support then I get 410 results (only for STM 
MCUs).

If you aim for devices that also provide ECC/RSA crypto in hardware + 
tamper-resistant key storage then we will move past the RFC 7228-type of 
constrained IoT device classes. You have can a look of what this means in 
context of Arm IP: 
https://developer.arm.com/products/system-ip/trustzone-security-ip

On a meta-level I have difficulties with the security design decisions made in 
IETF IoT-related groups since they swing back and forth between the extremes in 
pretty much no time. At the London IETF meeting I hear people talking about 
drafting guidelines for the use of new crypto algorithms with IoT devices since 
P256r1 and AES128-CCM is not good enough for them. At the same time I am having 
a hard time convincing people that using an unauthenticated identifier is not 
good for security.

Ciao
Hannes

-----Original Message-----
From: Ace [mailto:ace-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Michael Richardson
Sent: 14 May 2018 16:54
To: ace@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Ace] EST over CoAP


Hannes Tschofenig <hannes.tschofe...@arm.com> wrote:
    > Regarding the randomness requirement and the energy consumption. We
    > have been a bit advocate for adding hardware-based random numbers to
    > devices since randomness is a basic requirement for most security
    > protocols.

I think that this is the future, and I very much agree with you.

There seems to be a stock of older designs which have gone through other kinds 
of validation (for instance, think about the engineering review of physical 
cases and PCB design for electric metering).

My impression is that there is a desire to significantly update the security 
profile of these devices (some of which are in the field already).  What was 
deployed had poor security, or had proprietary protocols and there is a desire 
to move it up to "par".

The other thing I hear is that the crypto libraries involved take some time to 
get FIPS-140 certified and so the one that the devices were deployed with do 
RSA only, and there is a desire to update them to ECDSA (or EdDSA), and means 
new keys.

I think that any device with any kind of TPM would rather generate it's own 
keys.  Whether it's a physical TPM, or some kind of TrustZone,etc. version.

    > In a nutshell, I think you are better of recommending OEMs to select
    > the right hardware for the given task.

I'd like to find some text that acknowledges the past, while setting things up 
better for the future.

    > PS: For the proxy work (in context of DTLS/TLS) you might want to reach
    > out to your co-worker Owen Friel.

he's in other loops already, but he seems shy to post to lists.

    > IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are

I wish your email system would omit this, as it's both meaningless and 
sometimes harmful.

--
Michael Richardson <mcr+i...@sandelman.ca>, Sandelman Software Works  -= IPv6 
IoT consulting =-



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