Prototyping an Armored Data Vault Rights Management on Big Brothers Computer

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Prototyping an Armored Data VaultRights
Management on Big Brothers Computer

• Alex Iliev and Sean Smith
• Department of Computer Science/Institute for
  Security Technology Studies
• Dartmouth CollegeBrian Kiefer

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Presentation Format

• Introduction
• Background Information
• Prototype Design
• Implementation
• Conclusion and Future Work

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Introduction

• What is a Data Vault?
• Current Uses of data vaults
• Problems with Current Data Vaults
• How our Data Vault is Different

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What is a data vault?

• A data vault is simply a repository for
  information that cannot easily be accessed or
  tampered with unless you have authorization

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Current Uses of Data Vaults

• Digital Rights Management (DRM)
• To monitor network traffic
• University administration
• Law enforcement

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Problems with Current Data Vaults

• Horrible user administration
• Rights enforced only by cryptographic approach,
  instead of a computational approach
• There is no product that protects impinging
  citizens from Big Brothers access (Carnivore,
  Clipper)

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How our Data Vault is Different

• Few ways to protect network traffic
• Strict access policies that cannot easily be
  broken
• A tamper-proof vault therefore providing no easy
  access to encrypted data

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Background

• Evidence Collection
• The Packet Vault
• Related Previous Work

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Evidence Collection

• Carnivore (US)
• Allows the FBI to view network traffic at an ISP
  given a court order
• EU Directive Article 15.1
• Allows for the retention of data in cases of
  national security significance, without
  requirements for case by case authorization

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The Packet Vault

• Each conversation between two machines is
  encrypted with unique sessions keys
• Those session keys are encrypted using a public
  key, with the private key held by a trusted
  entity, the vault owner

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Weaknesses of the Current Vault Design

• Vulnerable to Insider Attack
• Access Flexibility
• Post-processing before output

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Related Previous Work

• Secure Coprocessors - Protects executable code by
  encrypting the code such that only the designated
  coprocessor can access it
• Most of the current data vaults protect data from
  a large organization against individual users

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Prototype Design

• Overview
• The Secure Hardware
• Access Policy
• Cryptographic Organization

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Overview of Our Armored Data Vault

• Our vault owners are the secure coprocessors
  known as Solomon
• Two secure coprocessors one to encrypt/archive
  and the other for arbitrating access to the
  archive (Encoder and Decoder)

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What the Solomon Does

• Posses and encryption key-pair and signing
  key-pair
• All stored traffic is encrypted with Solomons
  encryption key.
• Requests for access to the stored data re given
  to Solomon
• Evaluate the request
• Compute what data is to be released
• Crop the data to conform with policies before
  viewing

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The Secure Hardware

• Can be programmed in C (thus available in many
  platforms)
• With high assurance, it can carry out computation
  without possibility of being observed or
  surreptitiously modified
• Can prove that some data was produced by an
  uncompromised program running inside a coproccesor

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Access Policy

• The access policy is the central piece of the
  armored vault
• Decoder will only give access to the archive in
  accordance with the policy
• No on can extract any more information than given
  allowed in the policy

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Cryptographic Organization

• Encoder is initialized with the public encryption
  key of the Decoder
• The key is contained in an Application
  Certificate
• Note The encoder can determine if the alleged
  decoder is genuine from the application identity
  in the certification chain

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Implementation

• Linux PC hosting both the Encoder and Decoder PCI
  cards
• Packet dumps in libpcap-format via Snort
• Snort allows for IP defragmentation, selection of
  packets by content, and TCP stream re-assembly
  capability

• Snort Examples
• log tcp any any - any any
• In English
• Log TCP packets coming from any host, port 80,
  going to any host, any port
• alert tcp any any - 192.168.1.0/24 143
  (content 90C8 C0FF FFFF/bin/sh msg IMAP
  buffer overflow)

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Conclusions and Future Work

• Improve Performance
• Policy
• Remote Data Storage
• Academic PKI

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Questions?