Tamper response against physical and logical attacks on an hsm
AssigneeThales Dis Cpl USA, Inc.
InventorsSumant Das, Indresh Singh
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Provided is an electronic hardware sub-system within a multi-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) for tamper response against physical and logical attacks against the HSM. An HSM Manager manages and orchestrates the vHSMs for dynamic fraud analysis by way of a Tamper Prevention System, wherein a Watchdog detects intrusions and declares Tamper Events, and a Tamper Enforcement Module signals HSM Actors about a tamper state action responsive to said Tamper Event and intrusions. Once enabled, it protects multi-tenant applications against cryptographic attacks and offers continuous fraud detection in a layered approach that intelligently detects a root cause of an attack and isolated an impacted area in a tenant partition. Other embodiments disclosed.
Claims14
An electronic hardware sub-system within a multi-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) suitable for use for tamper response against physical and logical attacks against the HSM, the electronic hardware sub-system comprising:
- a Main Processor (MP) running an operating system (OS) that produces virtualized HSM instances (vHSMs) per tenant using virtualization technologies that are one among containers or micro Virtual Machines (uVMs) running crypto services logic;
- a Sensor Processor (SP) communicatively coupled to said MP over a PCIe communication channel to provide tamper handling against physical and logical attacks of said virtualized HSM instances on said HSM;
- and,
- an HSM Manager executing in said MP to
- manage and orchestrate said vHSMs for dynamic fraud analysis by way of a Tamper Prevention System on the HSM, and communicatively coupled to crypto client applications operating as tenants and sending API commands to said multi-tenant HSM,
- detect any kind of intrusions that happen at an actual tenant level of crypto API services offered by the HSM to them, and then,
- identify, and separate out, affected API services of a particular tenant to isolate physical and logical attacks against other tenants,
- wherein the MP and SP are distinct hardware devices that each can include one or more Central Processing Units (CPUs) and memory coupled to the one or more CPUs where the memory includes computer instructions which when executed by the one or more processors causes the one or more processors to perform the operations related to fraud analysis, threat detection, and tamper management.
A method suitable with an electronic hardware sub-system within a multi-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) for tamper response against physical and logical attacks against the HSM, the method comprising steps of:
- by way of a Main Processor (MP), running an operating system (OS) that produces virtualized HSM instances (vHSMs) per tenant using virtualization technologies that are one among containers or micro Virtual Machines (uVMs) running crypto services logic;
- by way of a Sensor Processor (SP) communicatively coupled to said MP over a PCIe communication channel, providing tamper handling against physical and logical attacks of said virtualized HSM instances on said HSM;
- and
- by way of an HSM Manager executing on said MP,
- managing and orchestrating said vHSMs for dynamic fraud analysis by way of a Tamper Prevention System on the HSM, and communicatively coupled to crypto client applications operating as tenants and sending crypto API commands to said multi-tenant HSM,
- detecting intrusions that happen at an actual tenant level of crypto API services offered by the HSM to them, and then,
- identifying, and separating out, affected API services of a particular tenant to isolate physical and logical attacks against other tenants.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.