WEB SENSING, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: OSD153-003

Description

We propose to develop a line of mobile security products that provide transparent protection for wireless and wired communication. The products can be deployed either as a wireless or cellular access point (WAP) or inserted within the wired Gigabit Ethernet path to a computer or subnet. Our approach leverages lessons learned from DoD PL5 high-assurance guards (HAGs) with pre-configured public-key encryption. Our key privacy assurance rests on the ability of each network appliance to encapsulate all networking, encryption, and policy enforcement within the protected boundary of a single chip. This became feasible only recently with the introduction of system-on-a-chip architectures such as the Xilinx Zynq and Altera HPS. These devices combine large FPGAs with encryption engines, networking support, and high-performance processors -- all on a single die.Consequently it is possible to establish a base-of-trust in FPGA hardware and eliminate vulnerable elements of the unencrypted software stack to deny remote access to the appliance. With no external interfaces, even physical attacks on lost or stolen devices must disassemble the chip; this requires exotic reverse engineering that cannot be applied within tactical time-scales. These measures ensure that privacy policies established within the device can be enforced without interception or tampering.