On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Matt Rice <[email protected]> wrote:
> nothing terribly important but food for thought
>
> so in attempting to port to cortex-A8 i inevitably let my mind wonder
> to the question
> in what ways can we leverage the additional security extensions
> provided, "Trustzone"[1] || [2]
>
> unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a natural fit for capability systems,
> by splitting things in to secure and insecure worlds, in some ways you
> could potentially avoid the need for
> attenuation, but you inevitably lose the ability to do fine grained
> access control
> the ability to give secure access to one device,
> yet withhold it from another while providing 'non-secure' access.

this probably deserves a better explanation.

what I mean is: say you have a keyboard driver

you can then attenuate this to an "non-exclusive keyboard capability"
and a "exclusive keyboard capability", the exclusive keyboard capability then
cuts off all non-exclusive access to the keyboard until some time.

with a direct mapping of the trustzone stuff, to capabilities
you could potentially hand out, "keyboard capabilities"
like candy, and hand out "secure", and "non-secure" capabilities,
that get passed to the keyboard capability

setting the device to secure mode then magically disables all insecure
access, but it seems your granularity is limited to a single "secure bit".
(my limited understanding of the domain protection model available in the mmu
may mean this is more flexible than I believe but still you are
limited to 16 domains).

> though, it could maybe be used in combination with attenuation,
> it'd have to be in ways which neither compromise or tie us to this
> specific implementation.

and this would just add some extra assurance that should someone
somehow get access to the keyboard location they'd need to also be running
with a secure bit.

> If nothing else, it can be used as possibly intended,
> transparently and on top of a system oblivious to it.
>
> I guess i'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts/knows of research
> done on the subject.
> googling doesn't really seem to provide anything but marketing stuff.
>
> http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.prd29-genc-009492c/index.html
> (pdf)
> http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.prd29-genc-009492c/PRD29-GENC-009492C_trustzone_security_whitepaper.pdf
>

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