Eclipse Heimlig

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 - 10:22 by Marco Langerwisch

Basics

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.

Project

Eclipse Heimlig

Parent Project

Eclipse Automotive

Working Group

Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle

Proposal State

Created

Background

Scope

Eclipse Heimlig is a Hardware Security Module (HSM) firmware for embedded platforms written in Rust.

As an HSM, Eclipse Heimlig typically runs on dedicated hardware and provides cryptographic services to clients running on other cores. These include:

Generation and secure storage of cryptographic keys.
Key use (encryption, decryption, signing, verification) without revealing key material to the client.
Generation of cryptographically secure random numbers (CSPRNG).

All elements will be developed in Rust, which brings major advantages in terms of security, efficiency, and reliability.

Description

Eclipse Heimlig is a Hardware Security Module (HSM) firmware for embedded platforms written in Rust.

As an HSM, Eclipse Heimlig typically runs on dedicated hardware and provides cryptographic services to clients running on other cores. These include:

Generation and secure storage of cryptographic keys.
Key use (encryption, decryption, signing, verification) without revealing key material to the client.
Generation of cryptographically secure random numbers (CSPRNG).

Eclipse Heimlig implements common cryptographic algorithms:

Symmetric encryption and decryption (AES-CBC, AES-GCM, AES-CCM, Chacha20Poly1305)
Signing and verification (ECDSA)
Key exchange (ECDH)
Hashing (SHA-2, SHA-3, BLAKE3)
Random number generation (ChaCha20Rng)

Licenses

Apache License, Version 2.0

The MIT License (MIT)

Why Here?

Encryption happens on multiple ECU's inside a vehicle. Having an HSM written in Rust can be of huge advantage and broad acceptance by the SDV development community.

Applying Open Source components in the security domain provides additional credibility of the code itself.

Future Work

Current limitations and hence open points for future work include:

Most cryptographic algorithms are implemented in software only, therefore make more use of hardware encryption
Asynchronous operation
The code should be independently audited by security experts.

Project Scheduling

First build already available (MVP)

People

Project Leads

Norbert Fabritius

Committers

Norbert Fabritius

Jan Bruckner

Ruslan Piasetskyi

Mentors

Gunnar Wagenknecht

Interested Parties