Evaluation Engineering - 21

and obviously not necessarily for a consumer level device, although if it's got
camera and microphone in it, you might
really have to start thinking about it.
Things like Secure Boot and Chain of
Trust and the like. Can you talk a little
bit more about that?
AG: Yeah, absolutely. And those are some
of the things you do need to think about
earlier on or because you need to think
about those features, they do need to be
considered early on because they do have
hardware ramifications. In my opinion,
any device needs to have, you should
have Secure Boot included in the capabilities. And so, that means having some
hardware hooks so that you've got some
ability to have some piece of code that's
immutable on the device, or to have some
Secure Boot artifacts on the device.
It is important that they are stored in
a trusted place that cannot be modified
or tampered with to ensure that you can
get that initial kernel up and running in
a way that you can verify that it hasn't
been tampered with. And so, that means
having maybe you have some boot code in
ROM, then the signature and validation
certificates for the rest of the code stored
in a place that's immutable so that bootROM can validate the other code before
it starts, before you start executing it. I
mean, there's different ways to do that.
You could have a TPM chip or other
hardware secure element in the device
that enables Secure Boot and then having the software around it to enable it, as
another approach that you can take. And
so yeah, that has to be built in from the
early stage of the hardware design. You
can build Secure Boot in without some
of those things, but without that root of
trust, you've got a potential gap that hackers can exploit.
There are many different hardware options that you can look at. I mean, you've
got things like Arm TrustZone, which is
now available for their ARM's M-class
MCUs. So it is available in some very low
end systems. You also have your company's building hardware secure elements,
like a TPM chip, but that are designed specifically for IoT use-cases. So that means
they are lower cost than the TPM chip.

The TPM chip has maybe a dollar
or two or something like that, which
building a PC or a smartphone is a very
reasonable cost to absorb. But if you're
building a sensor, that's going to cost 50
cents, then obviously, that doesn't work
anymore. So there are hardware devices
or hardware chips built for that market,
for that use-case.

EE: What are some of the challenges
Alan, in implementing well, frankly,
any type of a security solution, once I'm
starting to work on it, I've got my device
and okay, I'm going to be a Bluetooth
chip and I'm going to do this. Are there
any pitfalls I have to watch out for in
selecting a security solution?

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