A group of academics from Tel Aviv University have disclosed details of now-patched “severe” design flaws affecting about 100 million Android-based Samsung smartphones that could have resulted in the extraction of secret cryptographic keys.
The shortcomings are the result of an analysis of the cryptographic design and implementation of Android’s hardware-backed Keystore in Samsung’s Galaxy S8, S9, S10, S20, and S21 flagship devices, researchers Alon Shakevsky, Eyal Ronen, and Avishai Wool said.
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a secure zone that provides an isolated environment for the execution of Trusted Applications (TAs) to carry out security-critical tasks to ensure confidentiality and integrity.
On Android, the hardware-backed Keystore is a system that facilitates the creation and storage of cryptographic keys within the TEE, making them more difficult to be extracted from the device in a manner that prevents the underlying operating system from having direct access.
Instead, the Android Keystore exposes APIs in the form of Keymaster TA (trusted application) to perform cryptographic operations within this environment, including secure key generation, storage, and its usage for digital signing and encryption. On Samsung mobile devices, the Keymaster TA runs in an ARM TrustZone-based TEE. Read more:https://bit.ly/3svMGrN