Building a Secure Video Conference System with Customized Cryptographic USB Keys

• Main Authors: Wu, Pengyi, Cai, Quanwei, Wang, Qiongxiao, Cao, Hongjin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computational efficiency; Conferences; confidentiality; Hardware; key security; Side-channel attacks; Streaming media; Teleworking; Universal Serial Bus; USB Key; video conference
• ISSN: 1938-1883
• DOI: 10.1109/ICC42927.2021.9500888

The video conference has been widely adopted for telecommuting due to the convenience, and various schemes are proposed to provide the confidentiality and integrity of the stream data. However, due to the limitation of the video terminals, the adversary can still obtain the cryptographic key by exploiting the vulnerabilities of OS or other binaries in the video terminals, or launching various attacks such as cold-boot attacks, DMA attacks and side channel attacks. Once the cryptographic key is leaked, the confidentiality and integrity of the stream data will be broken. In this paper, we propose a secure video conference system by customizing the cryptographic USB key (called CCUK) for efficient cryptographic computation and secure key storage. In our scheme, the cryptographic key is stored and used (i.e., key agreement and data encryption/decryption) in CCUK, a dedicated hardware security module (HSM), which avoids the leakage of cryptographic key even when the video terminal is compromised. Moreover, CCUK only has one requirement on the video terminal, i.e., having the USB interface, and therefore can be deployed in almost all types of video terminals. CCUK is cost-effective compared to other types of HSMs, and its efficiency avoids the stream data encryption/decryption to be the performance bottleneck. We have implemented the proposed scheme, and deployed it to provide the confidentiality and integrity for a practical video conference system. The evaluation demonstrates that CCUK can support 1080P HD video conference.