RanCompute: Computational Security in Embedded Devices via Random Input and Output Encodings

Conference · 07 June 2022 · 2022 11th Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/meco55406.2022.9797150· OSTI ID:1997030

Hutto, Kevin ^[1]; Grijalva, Santiago ^[1]; Mooney, Vincent ^[2]

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1. Georgia Institute of Technology,School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Atlanta,Georgia
2. Georgia Institute of Technology,School of Electrical and Computer Engineering School of Computer Science,Atlanta,Georgia

An embedded device in an insecure environment is subject to additional security risk through capture and reverse-engineering by a capable adversary. If this device contains a microchip performing sensitive computations, capture of the chip may leak functionality to an adversary. In this paper we propose a novel method in which we randomly encode the input operands and the outputs of a computation, thus not revealing the arithmetic operations being performed. The operations are sequenced in a graph representing the overall application. Once the initialization values are overwritten and lost, the results of these computations are indecipherable by the device performing the calculations as well as by any adversary. The result is transmitted back to a secure server which has stored the initialization values and so can decode the results which appear random to the adversary.

• Research Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER)
• DOE Contract Number: CR0000004
• OSTI ID: 1997030
• Report Number(s): DOE-GATECH-00004-4
• Journal Information: 2022 11th Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO), Conference: 2022 11th Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO) Budva, Montenegro 07-10 June 2022
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Performance evaluation
Integrated circuits
Embedded computing
Reverse engineering
Observers
Encoding
Hardware