Security Made Solid with Non-Volatile NOVeA®

Synopsis:

Security, a buzzword and concept once perceived as a magical panacea, is now a term that is familiar to many logic designers. Some have even developed expertise in this area. The increased interest in security stems from two main factors: First, the need to reduce threats and damage resulting from security breaches and second the opportunity to deploy new revenue-generating applications. USB flash drives have exhibited remarkable growth, while enhancing the level of security. According to leading analysts, high-end phones will increase market share from 5% in 2004 to over 20% in 2008, showing over 50% annual growth, while integrating hardware-based security into the baseband or application processors.

Changes in the application landscape are the driving force behind the advances in the upcoming generation of handset processors and micro-controllers used for storage devices and dongles. Mobile handsets have evolved into fully developed computing devices, which bring together functionality that had previously been associated with media players, personal digital assistants, credit cards, flash drives and even laptops. As a result, the requirements of flash controllers are changing to meet the demands of these new applications. These include storage protection, digital content protection and authentication tokens.

Many of these secure applications involve sensitive information that changes over time, including PIN fail counter, e-cash balance and digital rights play-credit counter. To ensure that such stateful information is not illegally altered, it is often complemented by
integrity checksums. However, one simple attack can easily bypass such protection, enabling undetected tampering. By reprogramming the flash with a previously stored image, i.e. reflashing the flash memory, the attacker can restore any desired value that has since been altered. In this manner, a $100 e-cash balance can be consumed, but then reused endlessly without actually having to reload the balance. Similarly, a PIN attempts counter can be restored to circumvent PIN protection, and a play-counter of a digital rights management system protecting a popular Britney Spears song (with a countdown counter) can restore a previous counter value.

To counteract this rather simple attack, anti-reflash protection must be applied. This involves storing a special value that reflects the current state in on-chip storage designed to withstand reflash attacks. This value needs to be updated after any corresponding change to one of the values it protects, such as after any change in e-cash balance. Patent pending Discretix technology enables reflash-resistant protection of arbitrarily large storage by saving a relatively small, but cryptographically sufficient integrity checksum.

This is where the joint solution from Virage Logic and Discretix comes into play. Using the technology developed by Discretix, Virage’s NOVeA is effectively used to implement a secure storage mechanism which provides complete security services. 256 bits of NOVeA memory suffice for achieving confidentiality, data integrity and antireflash protection of arbitrarily large memory. NOVeA is integrated in the controller or processor chip and is not part of the flash memory susceptible to reflash attacks. Discretix
security solutions, comprised of hardware cryptographic engines, security middleware and device applications, rely on NOVeA for an optimal level of hardware-based security.

Discretix has already successfully deployed security solutions based on NOVeA. They have been proven to effectively address security needs and be easily integrated into storage devices and handset chipsets.

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