Jan Tobias Muehlberg (ULB and KULeuven)
February 8, 2024 at 12:30
Campus Plaine, P.NO9.06
Abstract : Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) can provide strong security guarantees in distributed systems, and even protect embedded software in the IoT or in critical control systems. Measuring the passage of time and taking actions based on such measurements is a common security-critical operation in many of these systems. Yet, few TEEs combine security with real-time processing and availability, or provide hard guarantees on the timeliness of code execution. A key difficulty here is that TEEs execute within an effectively untrusted environment, which can influence expectations on time and progress. In this talk, I will present our research on categorising approaches to tracking the passage of time in TEEs, highlighting the respective dependability guarantees. Focusing first on the popular Intel SGX architecture, we analyse to what extend time can be securely measured and utilised. We then broaden the scope to other popular trusted computing solutions and list common applications for each notion of time and progress, concluding that not every use case requires an accurate access to real-world time. Following this, I will present a configurable embedded security architecture that provides a notion of guaranteed real-time execution for dynamically loaded enclaves. We implement preemptive multitasking and restricted atomicity on top of strong enclave software isolation and attestation. Our approach allows the hardware to enforce confidentiality and integrity protections, while a decoupled small enclaved scheduler software component can enforce availability and guarantee strict deadlines of a bounded number of protected applications, without necessarily introducing a notion of priorities amongst these applications.
Bio : Jan Tobias Muehlberg works as a professor at ULB and as an associate researcher at KULeuven DistriNet Research Group. He researches topics involving privacy, safety and security of information and communication systems, with particular interest in dependable embedded systems and secure critical ICT infrastructures, and in interdisciplinary research on questions around the responsible and sustainable development and use of ICTs. Jan Tobias is specifically interested in societal aspects of security and privacy in dependable systems, in trusted execution environments, and in security architectures for safety-critical embedded systems. Before joining ULB, Jan Tobias worked as a research manager at KU Leuven (BE), a researcher at the University of Bamberg (DE), obtained a Ph.D. from the University of York (UK) and worked as a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Brandenburg (DE), where he also acquired his Master’s degree in Computer Science.