Politecnico di Torino | Servizi per la didattica

KEYWORD

Software Development Kit (SDK) Development for the Advanced Open-source Security Platform SEcube™

keywords DIGITAL SYSTEM DESIGN, EMBEDDED SOFTWARE, EMBEDDED SYSTEMS, HARDWARE SECURITY, OPEN-SOURCE, OPERATING SYSTEMS, SECURITY, SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT (SDK)

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.
In order to ease the development of complex applications, a Software Development Kit (SDK) is needed. The SDK must provide the users access to various SEcube™ APIs. These APIs implement all the secure functionalities offered by the SEcube™ platform (e.g., access to SmartCard functions, secure access to communication interface, cryptographic algorithms) hiding low-level details.

Goal of the thesis:

• Definition and implementation of a reference secure API set.
• Integration of the implemented APIs in a Software Development Kit (SDK).
• 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) to test the SDK.

Learning outcomes:

The candidate will gain advanced programming and coding skills, and in-depth knowledge of state-of-the-art security approaches and algorithms.
Moreover, she/he will acquire the abilities to develop software for next-generation embedded systems, with particular emphasis on security aspects and associated 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).