ma: finish firmware security smartphone analogy

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jaseg 2020-05-22 13:17:48 +02:00
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@ -779,23 +779,27 @@ flaw in Apple's iPhone SoC first-stage ROM bootloader\footnote{
flaw allows an attacker to circumvent these checks, booting code not authorized by Apple on a USB-connected iPhone,
compromising Apple's chain of trust from ROM loader to userland right at its root.
}, that allows a full compromise of any iPhone before the iPhone X. iPhone 8, one of the affected models, is still being
manufactured and sold by Apple today\footnote{
i.e. at the time this paragraph was written, on %FIXME
}. In another instance, Samsung put a flaw in their secure-world firmware used for protection of sensitive credentials
in their mobile phone SoCs in % FIXME year % .
If both of these very large companies have trouble securing parts of their secure embedded software stacks measuring a
mere few hundred bytes in Apple's case or a few kilobytes in Samsung's, what is a smart electricity meter manufacturer
to do? For their mass-market phones, these two companies have R\&D budgets that dwarf some countries' national budgets.
% FIXME hyperbole?
% FIXME cite
manufactured and sold by Apple until April 2020. In another instance in 2016 researchers found multiple flaws in the
secure-world firmware used by Samsung in their mobile phone SoCs. The flaws they found were both severe architectural
flaws such as secret user input being passed through untrusted userspace processes without any protection and shocking
cryptographic flaws such as CVE-2016-1919\footnote{\url{http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2016-1919}}\cite{kanonov01}. And
Samsung is not the only large multinational corporation having trouble securing their secure world firmware
implementation. In 2014 \textcite{rosenberg01} found an embarrassing integer overflow flaw in the low-level code
handling untrusted input in Qualcomm's QSEE firmware. For an overview of ARM TrustZone including a survey of academic
work and past security vulnerabilities of TrustZone-based firmware see \textcite{pinto01}.
Since thorough formal verification of code is not yet within reach for either large-scale software development or
code heavy in side-effects such as embedded firmware or industrial control software\cite{pariente01}
the two most effective measures for embedded security is reducing the amount of code on one hand, and labour-intensively
checking and double-checking this code on the other hand. A smart electricity manufacturer does not have a say in the
former since it is bound by the official regulations it has to comply with, and will almost certainly not have sufficient
resources for the latter.
% TODO expand?
If all of these very large companies have trouble securing parts of their secure embedded software stacks measuring a
mere few hundred bytes in Apple's case or a few kilobytes in Qualcomm's, what is a smart electricity meter manufacturer
to do? For their mass-market phones, these two companies have R\&D budgets that dwarf some countries' national budgets.
Since thorough formal verification of code is not yet within reach for either large-scale software development or code
heavy in side-effects such as embedded firmware or industrial control software\cite{pariente01} the two most effective
measures for embedded security is reducing the amount of code on one hand, and labour-intensively checking and
double-checking this code on the other hand. A smart electricity manufacturer does not have a say in the former since it
is bound by the official regulations it has to comply with, and will almost certainly not have sufficient
resources for the latter. We are left with an impasse: Manufacturers in this field likely do not have the saftey
resources to keep up with complex standards requirements. At the same time they have no option to reduce the scope of
their implementation to alleviate the burden on firmware security.
\subsection{Attack avenues in the smart grid}