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corePKCS11 Library

API Documentation Pages for current and previous releases of this library can be found here

PKCS #11 is a standardized and widely used API for manipulating common cryptographic objects. It is important because the functions it specifies allow application software to use, create, modify, and delete cryptographic objects, without ever exposing those objects to the application’s memory. For example, FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations use a small subset of the PKCS #11 API to, among other things, access the secret (private) key necessary to create a network connection that is authenticated and secured by the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol – without the application ever ‘seeing’ the key.

The Cryptoki or PKCS #11 standard defines a platform-independent API to manage and use cryptographic tokens. The name, "PKCS #11", is used interchangeably to refer to the API itself and the standard which defines it.

This repository contains a software based mock implementation of the PKCS #11 interface (API) that uses the cryptographic functionality provided by Mbed TLS. Using a software mock enables rapid development and flexibility, but it is expected that the mock be replaced by an implementation specific to your chosen secure key storage in production devices.

Only a subset of the PKCS #11 standard is implemented, with a focus on operations involving asymmetric keys, random number generation, and hashing.

The targeted use cases include certificate and key management for TLS authentication and code-sign signature verification, on small embedded devices.

corePKCS11 is implemented on PKCS #11 v2.4.0, the full PKCS #11 standard can be found on the oasis website.

This library has gone through code quality checks including verification that no function has a GNU Complexity score over 8, and checks against deviations from mandatory rules in the MISRA coding standard. Deviations from the MISRA C:2012 guidelines are documented under MISRA Deviations. This library has also undergone both static code analysis from Coverity static analysis and validation of memory safety through the CBMC automated reasoning tool.

See memory requirements for this library here.

corePKCS11 v3.6.2 source code is part of the FreeRTOS 202406.00 LTS release.

Purpose

Generally vendors for secure cryptoprocessors such as Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Hardware Security Module (HSM), Secure Element, or any other type of secure hardware enclave, distribute a PKCS #11 implementation with the hardware. The purpose of the corePKCS11 software only mock library is therefore to provide a non hardware specific PKCS #11 implementation that allows for rapid prototyping and development before switching to a cryptoprocessor specific PKCS #11 implementation in production devices.

Since the PKCS #11 interface is defined as part of the PKCS #11 specification replacing this library with another implementation should require little porting effort, as the interface will not change. The system tests distributed in this repository can be leveraged to verify the behavior of a different implementation is similar to corePKCS11.

corePKCS11 Configuration

The corePKCS11 library exposes preprocessor macros which must be defined prior to building the library. A list of all the configurations and their default values are defined in the doxygen documentation for this library.

Build Prerequisites

Library Usage

For building the library the following are required:

Optionally, variables from the pkcsFilePaths.cmake file may be referenced if your project uses cmake.

Integration and Unit Tests

In order to run the integration and unit test suites the following are dependencies are necessary:

The mbedtls, CMock, and Unity libraries are downloaded and built automatically using the cmake FetchContent feature.

Coverage Measurement and Instrumentation

The following software is required to run the coverage target:

Coverage builds are validated on recent versions of Ubuntu Linux.

Running the Integration and Unit Tests

  1. Navigate to the root directory of this repository in your shell.

  2. Run cmake to construct a build tree: cmake -S test -B build

    • You may specify your preferred build tool by appending -G'Unix Makefiles' or -GNinja to the command above.
    • You may append -DUNITTEST=0 or -DSYSTEM_TESTS=0 to disable Unit Tests or Integration Tests respectively.

  3. Build the test binaries: cmake --build ./build --target all

  4. Run ctest --test-dir ./build or cmake --build ./build --target test to run the tests without capturing coverage.

  5. Run cmake --build ./build --target coverage to run the tests and capture coverage data.

CBMC

To learn more about CBMC and proofs specifically, review the training material here.

The test/cbmc/proofs directory contains CBMC proofs.

In order to run these proofs you will need to install CBMC and other tools by following the instructions here.

Reference examples

The FreeRTOS-Labs repository contains demos using the PKCS #11 library here using FreeRTOS on the Windows simulator platform. These can be used as reference examples for the library API.

Porting Guide

Documentation for porting corePKCS11 to a new platform can be found on the AWS docs web page.

corePKCS11 is not meant to be ported to projects that have a TPM, HSM, or other hardware for offloading crypto-processing. This library is specifically meant to be used for development and prototyping.

Related Example Implementations

These projects implement the PKCS #11 interface on real hardware and have similar behavior to corePKCS11. It is preferred to use these, over corePKCS11, as they allow for offloading Cryptography to separate hardware.

Documentation

Existing Documentation

For pre-generated documentation, please see the documentation linked in the locations below:

Location
AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C
FreeRTOS.org

Note that the latest included version of corePKCS11 may differ across repositories.

Generating Documentation

The Doxygen references were created using Doxygen version 1.9.6. To generate the Doxygen pages, please run the following command from the root of this repository:

doxygen docs/doxygen/config.doxyfile

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.