In this paper…

„ 1 Background ...................1 Securing New

„ 2 The Market Need ...........2
Revenues through
„ 2.1 Digital Rights
Management
(DRM) ................2
Secure Storage
„ 2.2 Personal
Protected
Storage ..............2

„ 2.3 Corporate
Protected
Storage ..............3

„ 2.4 Securing
Credentials ..........5

„ 3 Threat Model .................7

„ 4 The Discretix Solution ...9 © 2005 Discretix Technologies Ltd.

„ 5 The Case of Remote

Security Management.....11
Discretix
„ 6 Conclusion ...................12
45 Ha’Melacha Street
Poleg Industrial Zone
Netanya, 42504, Israel

By: Ophir Shalitin

Director, Product Marketing - Cards
Ophir.shalitin@discretix.com

www.discretix.com
This document may be used in its complete form only and is solely for the use
of Discretix employees and authorized Discretix channels or customers. The
material herein is proprietary to Discretix Ltd.; any unauthorized reproduction
of any part thereof is strictly prohibited. The contents of this document are
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1 Background
Today, data applications become increasingly commonplace with more
applications running on a larger number of devices, handling a growing
quantity of data.

Two segments that are particularly affected by that trend are handsets
and USB flash drives sectors. Handsets require an ever-increasing
storage capacity, which is now shifted into removable storage devices.
Both the removable storage capacity for handsets and the capacity of
USB drives exhibit very fast compound annual growth rate (CAGR) –
220% in the case of removable storage devices for handsets and 70%
in the case of USB flash drives. The combined capacity of these two
segments is estimated to reach over 61,000,000 Gigabytes in 2007
(34,000,000 GB attributed to handsets without including the non-
removable storage, and 27,000,000 GB attributed to USB drives)1.

A large portion of this capacity will be used to store sensitive

information, creating an immediate need for secure storage
infrastructure.

In the mobile space, even the base-line handsets support new, more
advanced applications that require protection. These applications range
from entertainment-oriented ones that enforce copyrights to personal
secure storage that protects sensitive user information from prying
eyes.

In addition, high-end phones and Smartphones may be used for

corporate communication, carrying sensitive corporate information that
must be well protected.

Mass storage devices gain increasing popularity with average capacity

per device growing steadily (to over 300 Megabytes in 2007). As with
handsets, these devices must also protect sensitive consumer or
corporate information they carry.

1
Gartner 2004 and IDC 2003

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2 The Market Need
Many applications require secure storage. Following are a few of the
most common ones.

2.1 Digital Rights Management (DRM)

DRM ensures copyrights of songs, clips, maps, books and the like, or
executable applications that must not be violated. One of the schemes
gaining increasing popularity is Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), currently
known as OMA DRM V2.0. In that scheme DRM content and its related
rights are sent as two separate objects. The rights object has to be
securely stored as it carries the content deciphering key as well as the
policy that has to be enforced and may not be changed.

Other proprietary schemes follow suit and use the same concept of
sensitive rights object that must be stored securely.

2.2 Personal Secure Storage

As consumers store more and more personal information on their
handheld device, PDA or USB drive – devices that are susceptible to
loss and theft - the need to protect that information increases.

In the basic phones and older generation of handsets, most of the data
stored included private telephone lists and a log of SMS messages. In
contrast, in Smartphones e-mail messages, passwords and other
sensitive personal information are likely to be stored, requiring secure
storage.

USB drives are used not only to store and transfer information, but
also for secure personal applications such as password management
(single sign on). These applications naturally require secure storage for
all sensitive information.

Further enhancement of personal secure storage may enable

consumers to securely transfer their credentials from one device to
another. For example, a user purchases a new cell-phone and needs to
transfer all the credentials and private information stored on the older
device to the new one.

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2.3 Corporate Secure Storage
Enterprises depend more and more on a mobile sales force and on
employees who hold handsets such as Smartphones or PDAs. These
devices are used for sending confidential material that has to be
protected.

Moreover, organizations that deal largely with sensitive information,

such as military or government agencies, also work with mobile
computing devices with network connectivity. These organizations
require that any medium that stores organization-related information
be adequately protected.

Mass storage devices such as USB drives are beginning to be used for
specific applications where mass storage is combined with security
(secure storage).

For example, healthcare cards combine storage capacity that is

sufficient to accommodate medical information, including imaging, with
security that controls access to medical information. A sophisticated
control access mechanism may allow different entities to have different
authorizations: The patient would be able to see his/her records but
not modify them. The doctor would be able to update medical
information and read existing information but not administrative
information. Finally, the insurance company would be able to read the
medical information as well as read or update administrative
information.

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 Fig 1: Healthcare application

Corporate secure storage applications generally involve many users

using the same physical device. The device is operated by different
users at different times, or remotely through network connectivity; in
both cases a remote user may also log-in and perform certain
operations. Secure storage mechanism enforces the required access
control mechanism, so that each user obtains the legitimate pre-
defined access rights to the corresponding information that can be
read or manipulated by that user.

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 Corporate or enterprise-secure storage may also include an unblock
PIN/password mechanism that is known only by a ‘super trusted’ entity
(sometimes called ‘security officer’). Once PIN has been locked after
reaching the maximum allowed wrong PIN/password presentations,
the only way to salvage the protected information is by using the
unblock PIN/password and zeroing the PIN counter of the respective
PIN.

2.4 Securing Credentials

2.4.1 Financial and commercial applications

E/M-commerce and other financial applications require the use of
private credentials such as those used for authentication as well as
payment credentials. Authentication credentials often involve private
keys that have to be stored securely without granting read access even
to their legal owner (see 2.4.3 below); unique symmetric keys that are
stored in a similar manner may also be used to identify the user (or
device). In any case, identity key credentials are very sensitive and
should be well protected; ensuring that only the authorized user has
the right to utilize these keys (to sign, decrypt, etc.) but not read
them.

Payment credentials such as credit card numbers should not be read

by unauthorized users. These should only be transmitted (encrypted in
most cases) to the appropriate transaction terminal. These credentials
should be securely stored so access is granted only to the authorized
user who can make use of these credentials.

2.4.2 User Identification

In order to gain physical access, or access to a remote host over a
network, the user has to be identified. In order to identify users,
authentication credentials should be used as described above in 2.4.1.
Authentication credentials should be available only to the authorized
user (in most cases 2-factor authentication is used, where the
credential is regarded as “something I have” and the password
required to gain access to these credentials as “something I know”).

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2.4.3 Generic Key and Credential Storage
Other applications not listed above may also rely on cryptographic
credentials such as keys and certificates (e.g., loyalty information).
Secure Storage infrastructure serves these applications that interact
with the underlying secure storage whenever a key (or other
credential) has to be used. In other words, the mechanism used in the
examples above (2.4.1 and 2.4.2) should be a general one that is
application agnostic. The application may retrieve the password from
the user and present it to the secure storage mechanism, which in turn
tells the application which access rights are obtained (in case of
password verification); the application then loads the appropriate
symmetric key to the symmetric engine in order to retrieve (and
decrypt) the encrypted data or encrypt the clear-text data when
writing it back.

In such cases, in particular when operating with symmetric keys or

private keys, there should be no read access to the key, and the only
operations allowed should be encrypt/decrypt (or sign in the case of
private keys). In these cases the key’s security is assured as there is
no interface function that enables key retrieval, not even after
presenting passwords.

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3 Threat Model

Secure storage should secure data pertaining to each of the respective

players that use it. In the most extreme scenario, the users
themselves are part of the threat model and must not access the
plaintext data; this is the case of DRM where users are expected to use
(or consume) plaintext information that is protected by the application
and hence not accessible. The secure storage must assure that beyond
content rendering, content may not be copied or read. The key used to
encrypt such content must be well protected and be used only by the
authorized player (only to decrypt content, not to read the key but
rather to load it into the symmetric engine).

In addition, all the state-related information (i.e. stateful-rights), such

as current balance of an e-cash application, number of wrong PIN
entries and number of plays allowed for content, also has to be write-
protected against their respective users.

In the case of consumer and corporate secure storage, other users

(and of course malicious users or hackers) are part of the threat
model, while the authorized user can and should have all respective
rights for his/her information. In certain cases that may still include
read-only permissions, in which case the user is still part of the threat
model and write-access right should not be granted.

The level of attackers may be categorized as follows:

1. Legitimate user: mistakenly misuses the device or maliciously
tries to retrieve protected information (DRM content)
2. Malevolent user: will try to misuse the device to extract
protected data (may try to use published attacks)
3. Malevolent programmer: has access to software tools. May try to
use a debugger or write an application that will attempt to
circumvent device security.
4. Malevolent hardware engineer: has the resources to physically
probe the device.
5. Organized crime/government agencies: has practically unlimited
resources to reverse engineer the hardware.

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 The secure storage mechanism should protect against attackers from
the first four categories if the full strength of the supported
mechanisms is utilized. Certain secure storage implementation in
which the protected data is less sensitive may elect to use a lower
level of security in favor of more ease of use, and hence protect
against the first three levels.

Withstanding the fifth level of attacks is extremely difficult. There are

no available consumer devices (let alone applications) that are capable
of withstanding this level of attack.

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4 The Discretix Solution
The secure storage mechanism follows two main guidelines: strong
security has to be established to assure adequate protection of the
stored data, and maximum flexibility is provided to suit as many use
cases and scenarios in which different authorization mechanisms are
used.

In order for the secure storage to operate securely, all required

initialization credentials have to be loaded securely. This includes a
unique device-related secret random key that is used to encrypt all
other keys. This secret Key Encryption Key, called ‘CryptoKey’, is never
exposed to the application and may be loaded only into the symmetric
key cryptographic engine. Root certificate may also be loaded to later
verify signed information. In case initial credentials have been loaded,
the secure storage should prevent re-initialization by lighting an
‘initialized’ bit.

Now the secure storage is ready for user or enterprise data. Each
user/enterprise data object has a corresponding key with a set of
access control rules that define when this key can be used to decrypt
the encrypted data (or encrypt it in the case of write permission).
Authorization mechanism used in order to gain access rights includes
one of the following: PIN (digits only), Password (alpha-numeric
characters), a symmetric key or a signature. The latter two cases may
be used when a remote server is a legitimate entity with access rights
that has to be strongly authenticated. Then, a challenge response
mechanism may be used, based on either digitally signing a challenge
(an associated certificate is used as a verification method) or
encrypting a challenge with a shared key.

More than one authorization credential may be associated with a data

object in order to allow different entities that hold different credentials
to gain access to the same object (either the same or a different
access level).

The secure storage mechanism associates both policies and rights to

these authorization credentials. Policies include minimum
PIN/password or key length, number of wrong presentations (if any),
and an unblock PIN/password that may be used to open locked data
objects whose PIN/password counter has reached the maximum
allowed number.

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 Rights are typically read or read and write, but in some cases there
may be an alternate usage such as ‘permission to use’ instead of write
in case the data object itself is a key that may not be read or written.

Data integrity is also ensured in order to verify that no illegal change

has occurred (even a random change that is part of a blind fault
attack), or that an attempt to rewrite a previously legal image of the
memory (that has already been changed) has taken place. In such a
case, the secure storage mechanism will indicate that integrity is
flawed.

As a natural security precaution, the secret CryptoKey encrypts the

internal table that contains all the credentials associated with
authorizations and their associated policy, stateful information
(PIN/password counter value), and integrity values.

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5 The Case of Remote Security Management
Enterprise-secure storage, as opposed to consumer-secure storage is
likely to be based on a central managing entity that we refer to as the
‘security officer’ or an administrator with rights to manage other
access rights or a sub-set of them. The server has to be strongly
authenticated, since the most sensitive permissions and access
mechanism can be changed by that entity (e.g. deleting rights of
employees who leave, editing rights of those who changed their
position, or changes of personnel who are in contact with the patient in
the case of healthcare).

Following SO authentication, it is necessary to support mechanisms

that are based on session key in order to prevent replay attack.
Session key will be generated in each such session as part of or
following SO authentication.

Whenever there is a live session with the SO, that session should be
indicated in the secure storage mechanism. The secure storage
mechanism may need to query the status of this bit in order to provide
the rights associated with it, in accordance with what is specified in the
security record associated with the data object.

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6 Conclusion
Mobile handsets, storage cards to be used in mobile handsets, and
USB drives are three categories of devices that require rapidly
growing, memory storage capacity. A large portion of the information
stored in these devices is sensitive personal, corporate or
governmental information that requires strong protection from prying
eyes.

Some applications that require protection include the following:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) where premium content has to be

protected even against misuse by its rightful owner.

Personal Secure Storage – protection of private information.

Corporate Secure Storage – protection of information that is potentially

shared among different users with different access privileges, such as
healthcare cards where the patient has different rights from the doctor
and the insurer.

Financial and identification credentials – have to be stored securely,

directly inaccessible even to their legal owner. Symmetric or private
keys should be used without being exposed (so that only the output of
the corresponding operation will be exposed).

General purpose secure storage has to address all such applications

and provide a flexible but strong secure storage.

Symmetric keys and private keys have to be used internally (i.e.

loaded into the cryptographic engines to perform operations), without
ever being exposed (such as being accessible to other applications).

Access control mechanism should support hierarchical privileges with

multiple supported users including a security officer. Diverse
authentication mechanisms such as PIN, Password and
challenge/response have to be supported.

Discretix Secure Storage Toolkit solution addresses all these issues

and provides highly secure general purpose storage. State-of-the-art
countermeasures ensure a very high level of robustness. The Toolkit
supports multiple users, multiple authentication mechanism, and an
efficient mechanism to protect arbitrarily large memory capacity.

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