The next talk is given by Suresh Chari,from IBM’s Watson research center, who are still working on their Caernarvon secure operating system, this time protecting random number generation from side-channel attacks.
The talk starts on an interesting property of security certification. The FIPS140-2 certification scheme mandates the testing of random-number generation (RNG) features before they can be used by an application. By forcing this extensive testing, FIPS140 makes the random number generators more sensitive to side-channel attacks, because the tests intenely use the feature that should be protected.
This is a very nice example of systemic failure. In this case, the risk actually comes from the very security certification that is supposed to reduce risk. Nothing new, but another confirmation that is is extremely hard to design security principles (or certification schemes) that can be universally applied to a wide variety of devices.
This is proven again by the fact that the new smart card platform protection profile (BSI-PP-0035) raises this issue of testing and addresses it. You get a better view of things when you are closer.
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