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Steady

A Simple End-to-End Secure Logging System

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Secure IT Systems (NordSec 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11252))

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Abstract

We present Steady: an end-to-end secure logging system engineered to be simple in terms of design, implementation, and assumptions for real-world use. Steady gets its name from being based on a steady (heart)beat of events from a forward-secure device sent over an untrusted network through untrusted relays to a trusted collector. Properties include optional encryption and compression (with loss of confidentiality but significant gain in goodput), detection of tampering, relays that can function in unidirectional networks (e.g., as part of a data diode), cost-effective use of cloud services for relays, and publicly verifiable proofs of event authenticity. The design is formalized and security proven in the standard model. Our prototype implementation (\(\approx \)2,200 loc) shows reliable goodput of over 1M events/s (\(\approx \)160 MiB/s) for a realistic dataset with commodity hardware for a device on a GigE network using 16 MiB of memory connected to a relay running at Amazon EC2.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example Directive 2006/24/EC http://europa.eu/!BM68tq, accessed 2018-08-08.

  2. 2.

    Compression breaks semantic security and depending on setting completely neglects any encryption [8], as shown, e.g, in the CRIME and BREACH attacks.

  3. 3.

    The block metadata i, \(\ell _c\), and \(\ell _p\) are hashed together with the hash of the payload that is likely high entropy, unlike the metadata.

  4. 4.

    If the adversary can modify or remove a block already read from the relay by the collector this would cause \(\mathsf {check}\) to fail but this is not relevant for security.

  5. 5.

    NaCl box (https://nacl.cr.yp.to/box.html) uses Salsa20 and Poly1305, we use AES256-GCM instead for the hardware speed-up on selected platforms.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/pylls/steady-c, Apache 2.0 license.

  7. 7.

    https://libsodium.org/, accessed 2018-08-05.

  8. 8.

    https://lz4.github.io/lz4/, accessed 2018-08-05.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/pylls/steady, Apache 2.0 license.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Christian Gotare, Anders Lidén, Mattias Nordlund, and Roel Peeters for valuable feedback. This research as part of the HITS research profile was funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Tobias Pulls & Rasmus Dahlberg

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  1. Tobias Pulls
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  2. Rasmus Dahlberg
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Correspondence to Tobias Pulls .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Nils Gruschka

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Pulls, T., Dahlberg, R. (2018). Steady. In: Gruschka, N. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11252. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03638-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03638-6_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03637-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03638-6

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