arXiv subjects

Md Armanuzzaman

Publications and source records attributed to Md Armanuzzaman.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

"We just did not have that on the embedded system": Insights and Challenges for Securing Microcontroller Systems from the Embedded CTF Competitions

Microcontroller systems are integral to our daily lives, powering mission-critical applications such as vehicles, medical devices, and industrial control systems. Therefore, it is essential to investigate and outline the challenges encountered in developing secure microcontroller systems. While previous research has focused solely on microcontroller firmware analysis to identify and characterize vulnerabilities, our study uniquely leverages data from the 2023 and 2024 MITRE eCTF team submissions and post-competition interviews. This approach allows us to dissect the entire lifecycle of secure microcontroller system development from both technical and perceptual perspectives, providing deeper insights into how these vulnerabilities emerge in the first place. Through the lens of eCTF, we identify fundamental conceptual and practical challenges in securing microcontroller systems. Conceptually, it is difficult to adapt from a microprocessor system to a microcontroller system, and participants are not wholly aware of the unique attacks against microcontrollers. Practically, security-enhancing tools, such as the memory-safe language Rust, lack adequate support on microcontrollers. Additionally, poor-quality entropy sources weaken cryptography and secret generation. Our findings articulate specific research, developmental, and educational deficiencies, leading to targeted recommendations for researchers, developers, vendors, and educators to enhance the security of microcontroller systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

ENOLA: Linear-Space and Low-Overhead Control-Flow Attestation for Microcontroller-based Systems

Control-Flow Attestation (CFA) aims to precisely verify execution paths to a remote verifier. However, existing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with resource-constrained, microcontroller-based systems due to the following reasons: (1) the overhead of transmitting measurement and trace data scales poorly (i.e., often exponentially) with the number of basic blocks or linearly with the length of execution traces, making such approaches impractical even on high-end microprocessor-based systems and entirely infeasible on microcontrollers; (2) cryptographic keys and measurement data are typically stored in memory, rendering them vulnerable to cold boot and memory corruption attacks, which is a serious threat for field-deployed devices; and (3) reliance on software-based measurements, combined with frequent context switches between the Rich Execution Environment (REE) and the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), introduces significant performance overhead. In this paper, we present ENOLA, a linear-space and low-overhead control-flow attestation solution for microcontroller-based systems. ENOLA achieves linear transmission complexity with basic blocks, guaranteeing its scalability for larger programs. Moreover, ENOLA uses hardware-assisted measurement computation present in off-the-shelf devices, and avoids key storage in memory. ENOLA also allocates general-purpose registers for measurements to thwart memory corruption attacks. ENOLA significantly reduces context switching overhead by eliminating transitions from REE to TEE for backward-edge measurements. We developed the ENOLA compiler using LLVM passes and a custom attestation engine targeting the ARMv8.1-M architecture. Our evaluation shows that ENOLA reduces data transmission overhead by an average of 52x on the Embench, while maintaining performance comparable to (or exceeding) that of existing approaches.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Building Your Own Trusted Execution Environments Using FPGA

In recent years, we have witnessed unprecedented growth in using hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) or enclaves to protect sensitive code and data on commodity devices thanks to new hardware security features, such as Intel SGX and Arm TrustZone. Even though the proprietary TEEs bring many benefits, they have been criticized for lack of transparency, vulnerabilities, and various restrictions. For example, existing TEEs only provide a static and fixed hardware Trusted Computing Base (TCB), which cannot be customized for different applications. Existing TEEs time-share a processor core with the Rich Execution Environment (REE), making execution less efficient and vulnerable to cache side-channel attacks. Moreover, TrustZone lacks hardware support for multiple TEEs, remote attestation, and memory encryption. In this paper, we present BYOTee (Build Your Own Trusted Execution Environments), which is an easy-to-use infrastructure for building multiple equally secure enclaves by utilizing commodity Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) devices. BYOTee creates enclaves with customized hardware TCBs, which include softcore CPUs, block RAMs, and peripheral connections, in FPGA on demand. Additionally, BYOTee provides mechanisms to attest the integrity of the customized enclaves' hardware and software stacks, including bitstream, firmware, and the Security-Sensitive Applications (SSA) along with their inputs and outputs to remote verifiers. We implement a BYOTee system for the Xilinx System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA. The evaluations on the low-end Zynq-7000 system for four SSAs and 12 benchmark applications demonstrate the usage, security, effectiveness, and performance of the BYOTee framework.

cs.CR↗