INTRUST 2010

I attended INTRUST 2010 in Beijing, China. The conference focused on all aspects of trusted systems like trusted modules, platforms, services and applications. In this year, program was split on two parts. In first two days was technical session where the audience was able to select talks from main topics like Hardware Security, Security Analysis, Software Protection or Mobile Trusted Systems. Third day was reserved for Workshop with Invited Talks with keynote speakers like Andrew Yao, Moti Yung, Ahmed-Reza Sadeghi or Liqun Chen.

The bast paper award was sponsored by Singapore Management University (US$1000) and was given to "Seamless Integration of Trusted Computing into Standard Cryptographic Frameworks" by Andreas Reiter, Georg Neubauer, Michael Kapfenberger, Johannes Winter and Kurt Dietrich from IAIK, Graz. This was the first presentation of the conference and in this talk author presented a novel design for Trusted Software Stack (TSS) - interface between applications and Trusted Platform Module (TPMs). Proposed TSS can be easily integrated into existing security frameworks and reuse application programming interface (APIs) from well known frameworks. Presented stack has nice features like dynamically loading components via the network, add, update or replaced functionality even after deployment and support multiple TPMs. The last features is especially nice for mobile devices and systems with many virtual TPMs. The prof of concept was done with the BoncyCastle security framework, but according to authors further enhancement might include integration into Java Cryptographic Extension and CryptoAPI.

Just after first session I gave a talk on "Hardware Trojans for Inducing or Amplifying Side-Channel Leakage of Cryptographic Software", where I presented a novel concept of micro-architectural Trojan Side Channels.

Definitively the last day of the conference was the best one. Many keynote speakers was invited to give a talk: Andrew Yao - "Some Perspectives on Complexity-Based Cryptography"; Moti Yung - "Embedding Cryptography to General IT Engineering System/Project"; Liquen Chen - "Security and Privacy in Vehicular Systems - Case Study: Trusted Anonymous Announcement"; Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi - "Trusted and Secure Computing in Practice: Where are We Now!" and many others.

During this session very interesting talk was given by DongHoon Lee from Korea University on Security Issues in Smart Grid. He highlights security problems in smart grids like privacy of smart meters users and smart meter attacks. According to wikipedia smart meter is an advanced meter that records consumption in intervals of an hour or less and communicates that information at least daily via some communications network back to the utility for monitoring and billing purposes. This information of consumption might reveal (if is not protected) e.g. user's lifestyle pattern which might be considered as a privacy violation. Author presented also the list of possible attacks on smart meters. The last part of the talk was dedicated to security requirements of smart meters and a need of security standards in this field.

The last talk of the conference was given by Claire Vishik from Intel. She briefly introduced "Direction in Hardwire Security R&D in Government, Academic and Industrial Research". The audience was able to listen some state-of-the-art security issues from industry, academia and government perspective, advantages and disadvantages of all of them and point of interests in terms of security research. The last part of the talk was focused on Intel's work and vision - goals and future.