Politecnico di Torino | Servizi per la didattica

KEYWORD

Secure Device Drivers Development for the Advanced Open-Source Security Platform SEcube™

keywords DIGITAL SYSTEM DESIGN, EMBEDDED SOFTWARE, EMBEDDED SYSTEMS, HARDWARE SECURITY, OPEN-SOURCE, OPERATING SYSTEMS, SECURITY, SYSTEM LEVEL DESIGN & TEST

Reference persons PAOLO ERNESTO PRINETTO

External reference persons Pascal TROTTA (PhD student), Giuseppe AIRO´ FARULLA (PhD Student), Tiziana MARGARIA (Lero, Limerick, Ireland)

Research Groups TESTGROUP - TESTGROUP

Thesis type EXPERIMENTAL

Description Motivations:

Nowadays, many services and applications need to be secured in order to guarantee the users’ privacy as well as the commercial and legal issues related to security threats and to safeguard the business stakeholders. While several standards, protocols and algorithms exist for handling the basic primitives for security (i.e., confidentiality, authentication, privacy), their implementation in real objects may require very high expertise and efforts.
The development of the Advanced Open-source Security Platform SEcube™ (Secure Environment Cube) tries to fill this gap providing heterogeneous security-oriented hardware, coupled with an open-source modular software architecture In the Platform, all the functional blocks are isolated and well documented in order to deliver to developers an easy-way to build, understand, modify, and rewrite the whole system if wanted.
The SEcube™ hardware consists of a single System-on-Chip (SoC) composed of three main blocks: (i) a low-power ARM Cortex-M4 processor, (ii) a flexible and fast Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA), and (iii) an EAL5+ certified embedded SmartCard.
All these features make the SEcube™ platform perfectly suitable for a wide range of applications where security is a major concern, including, among the others, Telecommunications, Internet of Things and Home Automation.
A comprehensive set of drivers is required to allow the SEcube™ platform to be actually used in the above listed applications. In particular, low-level secure software drivers are needed to allow the applications software and/or the Operating System running on the processor to access the security features offered by the embedded certified SmartCard, the interfaces (e.g., UART, SPI, Ethernet) of the SEcube™ platform, and to transfer data to/from the FPGA module.

Goal of the thesis:

Software stack and requirements definition based on SEcube™ hardware architecture, as well as the definition of the capabilities and possibilities offered by the platform.
Definition and implementation of the necessary set of drivers.
Selection and setup of a reference use case (e.g., secure remote access to an industrial machine equipped with a microcontroller and connected to the network).
Implementation and demonstration of the considered test case to test the drivers (and possibly a SDK to offer programmers with high level APIs).

Learning outcomes:

The candidate will acquire the abilities to develop and deploy applications for next-generation embedded systems, with particular emphasis on security aspects and associated software requirements.

External/Industrial cooperations:

The thesis will be carried out in collaboration with:
• Blu5 View Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)
• CINI CyberSecurity National Lab, Nodo di Torino (Torino, Italy)
• Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre (Limerick, Ireland)
• LIRMM (Montpellier, France).