A Generic Security API for Symmetric Key Management on Cryptographic Devices

Security APIs are used to define the boundary between trusted and untrusted code. The security properties of existing APIs are not always clear. In this paper, the authors give a new generic API for managing symmetric keys on a trusted cryptographic device. They state and prove security properties for the API. In particular, the API offers a high level of security even when the host machine is controlled by an attacker. The API is generic in the sense that it can implement a wide variety of (symmetric key) protocols. As a proof of concept, they give an algorithm for automatically instantiating the API commands for a given key management protocol.