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tillitis-key/doc/system_description/software.md

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Tillitis TKey software

NOTE: Documentation migrated to dev.tillitis.se, this is kept for history. This is likely to be outdated.

Introduction

This text is both an introduction to and a requirement specification of the TKey firmware, its protocol, and an overview of how TKey applications are supposed to work. For an overview of the TKey concepts, see System Description.

First, some definitions:

  • Firmware - software in ROM responsible for loading applications. The firmware is included as part of the FPGA bit stream.
  • Application or app - software supplied by the host machine which is received, loaded, measured, and started by the firmware.

The TKey has two modes of software operation: firmware mode and application mode. The firmware mode has the responsibility of receiving, measuring, loading, and starting the application. When the firmware is about to start the application it switches to a more constrained environment, the application mode.

The firmware and application uses a memory mapped input/output (MMIO) for communication with the hardware. The memory map is constrained when running in application mode, e.g. FW-RAM and UDS isn't readable, and several MMIO addresses are either not readable or not writable for the application.

See table in the System Description for details about access rules control in the memory system and MMIO.

The firmware (and optionally all software) on the TKey can communicate to the host via the UART_{RX,TX}_{STATUS,DATA} registers, using the framing protocol described in Framing Protocol.

The firmware defines a protocol on top of this framing layer which is used to bootstrap the application. All commands are initiated by the host. All commands receive a reply. See Firmware protocol for specific details.

Applications define their own protocol used for communication with their host part. They may or may not be based on the Framing Protocol.

CPU

The CPU is a PicoRV32, a 32-bit RISC-V processor (arch: RV32IC_Zmmul) which runs the firmware and the application. The firmware and application both run in RISC-V machine mode. All types are little-endian.

Constraints

  • ROM: 6 kByte.
  • RAM: 128 kByte.

Firmware

The purpose of the firmware is to bootstrap and measure an application.

The TKey has 128 kilobyte RAM. Firmware loads the application at the start of RAM. The current C runtime (crt0.S) of apps in our apps repo sets up the stack to start just below the end of RAM. This means that a larger app comes at the compromise of it having a smaller stack.

The firmware is part of FPGA bitstream (ROM), and is loaded at 0x0000_0000.

When the firmware starts it clears all RAM and then wait for commands coming in on UART_RX.

Typical use scenario:

  1. The host sends the FW_CMD_LOAD_APP command with the size of the device app and the optional user-supplied secret as arguments and and gets a FW_RSP_LOAD_APP back. After using this it's not possible to restart the loading of an application.

  2. If the the host receive a sucessful response, it will send multiple FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA commands, together containing the full application.

  3. On receivingFW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA commands the firmware places the data into 0x4000_0000 and upwards. The firmware replies with a FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA response to the host for each received block except the last data block.

  4. When the final block of the application image is received with a FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA, the firmware measure the application by computing a BLAKE2s digest over the entire application. Then firmware send back the FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA_READY response containing the measurement.

  5. The Compound Device Identifier (CDI) is then computed by using the UDS, application digest, and the USS, and placed in CDI. (see Compound Device Identifier computation) Then the start address of the device app, 0x4000_0000, is written to APP_ADDR and the size to APP_SIZE to let the device application know where it is loaded and how large it is, if it wants to relocate in RAM.

  6. The firmware now clears the special FW_RAM where it keeps it stack. After this it does no more function calls and uses no more automatic variables.

  7. Firmware starts the application by first switching to application mode by writing to the SWITCH_APP register. In this mode the MMIO region is restricted, e.g. some registers are removed (UDS), and some are switched from read/write to read-only (see memory map).

    Then the firmware jumps to what's in APP_ADDR which starts the application.

    There is now no other means of getting back from application mode to firmware mode than resetting/power cycling the device.

Developing firmware

Standing in hw/application_fpga/ you can run make firmware.elf to build just the firmware. You don't need all the FPGA development tools mentioned in Toolchain setup.

You need clang with 32 RISC-V support -march=rv32iczmmul which comes in clang 15. If you don't have version 15 you might get by with -march=rv32imc but things will break if you ever cause it to emit div instructions.

You also need llvm-ar, llvm-objcopy, llvm-size and lld. Typically these are all available in packages called "clang", "llvm", "lld" or similar.

If your available objcopy and size commands is anything other than the default llvm-objcopy and llvm-size define OBJCOPY and SIZE to whatever they're called on your system before calling make firmware.elf.

If you want to use our emulator, clone the tk1 branch of our version of qemu and build:

$ git clone -b tk1 https://github.com/tillitis/qemu
$ mkdir qemu/build
$ cd qemu/build
$ ../configure --target-list=riscv32-softmmu --disable-werror
$ make -j $(nproc)

(Built with warnings-as-errors disabled, see this issue.)

Run it like this:

$ /path/to/qemu/build/qemu-system-riscv32 -nographic -M tk1,fifo=chrid -bios firmware.elf \
  -chardev pty,id=chrid

This attaches the FIFO to a tty, something like /dev/pts/16 which you can use with host software to talk to the firmware.

To quit QEMU you can use: Ctrl-a x (see Ctrl-a ? for other commands).

Debugging? Use the HTIF console by removing -DNOCONSOLE from the CFLAGS and using the helper functions in lib.c like htif_puts() htif_putinthex() htif_hexdump() and friends for printf-like debugging.

You can add -d guest_errors to the qemu commandline to make QEMU send errors from the TK1 machine to stderr, typically things like memory writes outside of mapped regions.

You can also use the qemu monitor for debugging, e.g. info registers, or run qemu with -d in_asm or -d trace:riscv_trap.

Reset

The PicoRV32 starts executing at 0x0000_0000. We allow no .data or .bss sections. Our firmware starts at the _start symbol in start.S which first clears all RAM for any remaining data from previous applications, then initializes a stack starting at the top of FW_RAM at 0xd000_0800 and downwards and then calls main.

When the initialization is finished, the firmware waits for incoming commands from the host, by busy-polling the UART_RX_{STATUS,DATA} registers. When a complete command is read, the firmware executes the command.

Firmware state machine

States:

  • initial - At start.
  • loading - Expect application data.
  • run - Computes CDI and starts the application.
  • fail - Stops waiting for commands, flashes LED forever.

Commands in state initial:

command next state
FW_CMD_NAME_VERSION unchanged
FW_CMD_GET_UDI unchanged
FW_CMD_LOAD_APP loading

Commands in state loading:

command next state
FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA unchanged or run on last chunk

Commands in state run: None.

Commands in state fail: None.

See Firmware protocol for the definition of the specific commands and their responses.

User-supplied Secret (USS)

USS is a 32 bytes long secret provided by the user. Typically a host program gets a secret from the user and then does a key derivation function of some sort, for instance a BLAKE2s, to get 32 bytes which it sends to the firmware to be part of the CDI computation.

Compound Device Identifier computation

The CDI is computed by:

CDI = blake2s(UDS, blake2s(app), USS)

In an ideal world, software would never be able to read UDS at all and we would have a BLAKE2s function in hardware that would be the only thing able to read the UDS. Unfortunately, we couldn't fit a BLAKE2s implementation in the FPGA at this time.

The firmware instead does the CDI computation using the special firmware-only FW_RAM which is invisible after switching to app mode. We keep the entire firmware stack in FW_RAM and clear it just before switching to app mode just in case.

We sleep for a random number of cycles before reading out the UDS, call blake2s_update() with it and then immediately call blake2s_update() again with the program digest, destroying the UDS stored in the internal context buffer. UDS should now not be in FW_RAM anymore. We can read UDS only once per power cycle so UDS should now not be available to firmware at all.

Then we continue with the CDI computation by updating with an optional USS and then finalizing the hash, storing the resulting digest in CDI.

Firmware protocol

The firmware commands and responses are built on top of the Framing Protocol.

The commands look like this:

name size (bytes) comment
Header 1 Framing protocol header including length
of the rest of the frame
Command/Response 1 Any of the below commands or responses
Data n Any additional data

The responses might include a one byte status field where 0 is STATUS_OK and 1 is STATUS_BAD.

Note that the integer types are little-endian (LE).

FW_CMD_NAME_VERSION (0x01)

Get the name and version of the stick.

FW_RSP_NAME_VERSION (0x02)

name size (bytes) comment
name0 4 ASCII
name1 4 ASCII
version 4 Integer version (LE)

In a bad response the fields will be zeroed.

FW_CMD_LOAD_APP (0x03)

name size (bytes) comment
size 4 Integer (LE)
uss-provided 1 0 = false, 1 = true
uss 32 Ignored if above 0

Start an application loading session by setting the size of the expected device application and a user-supplied secret, if uss-provided is 1. Otherwise USS is ignored.

FW_RSP_LOAD_APP (0x04)

Response to FW_CMD_LOAD_APP

name size (bytes) comment
status 1 STATUS_OK or STATUS_BAD

FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA (0x05)

name size (bytes) comment
data 127 Raw binary app data

Load 127 bytes of raw app binary into device RAM. Should be sent consecutively over the complete raw binary. (128 == largest frame length minus the command byte).

FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA (0x06)

Response to all but the ultimate FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA commands.

name size (bytes) comment
status 1 STATUS_OK/STATUS_BAD

FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA_READY (0x07)

The response to the last FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA is an FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA_READY with the un-keyed hash digest for the application that was loaded. It allows the host to verify that the application was correctly loaded. This means that the CDI calculated will be correct given that the UDS has not been modified.

name size (bytes) comment
status 1 STATUS_OK/STATUS_BAD
digest 32 BLAKE2s(app)

FW_CMD_GET_UDI (0x08)

Ask for the Unique Device Identifier (UDI) of the device.

FW_RSP_GET_UDI (0x09)

Response to FW_CMD_GET_UDI.

name size (bytes) comment
status 1 STATUS_OK/STATUS_BAD
udi 4 Integer (LE) with Reserved (4 bit), Vendor (2 byte),
Product ID (6 bit), Product Revision (6 bit)
udi 4 Integer serial number (LE)

Get the name and version of the device

host ->
  u8 CMD[1 + 1];

  CMD[0].len = 1    // command frame format
  CMD[1]     = 0x01 // FW_CMD_NAME_VERSION

host <-
  u8 RSP[1 + 32]

  RSP[0].len  = 32   // command frame format
  RSP[1]      = 0x02 // FW_RSP_NAME_VERSION

  RSP[2..6]   = NAME0
  RSP[6..10]  = NAME1
  RSP[10..14] = VERSION

  RSP[14..]   = 0

Load an application

host ->
  u8 CMD[1 + 128];

  CMD[0].len = 128  // command frame format
  CMD[1]     = 0x03 // FW_CMD_LOAD_APP

  CMD[2..6]  = APP_SIZE

  CMD[6]     = USS supplied? 0 = false, 1 = true
  CMD[7..39] = USS
  CMD[40..]  = 0

host <-
  u8 RSP[1 + 4];

  RSP[0].len = 4    // command frame format
  RSP[1]     = 0x04 // FW_RSP_LOAD_APP

  RSP[2]     = STATUS

  RSP[3..]   = 0

repeat ceil(APP_SIZE / 127) times:
host ->
  u8 CMD[1 + 128];

  CMD[0].len = 128  // command frame format
  CMD[1]     = 0x05 // FW_CMD_LOAD_APP_DATA

  CMD[2..]   = APP_DATA (127 bytes of app data, pad with zeros)

host <-
  u8 RSP[1 + 4]

  RSP[0].len = 4    // command frame format
  RSP[1]     = 0x06 // FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA

  RSP[2]     = STATUS

  RSP[3..]   = 0

Except response from last chunk of app data which is:

host <-
  u8 RSP[1 + 128]

  RSP[0].len = 128  // command frame format
  RSP[1]     = 0x07 // FW_RSP_LOAD_APP_DATA_READY

  RSP[2]     = STATUS

  RSP[3..35]   = app digest
  RSP[36..]    = 0

Firmware services

The firmware exposes a BLAKE2s function through a function pointer located in MMIO BLAKE2S (see memory map) with the with function signature:

int blake2s(void *out, unsigned long outlen, const void *key,
	    unsigned long keylen, const void *in, unsigned long inlen,
	    blake2s_ctx *ctx);

where blake2s_ctx is:

typedef struct {
	uint8_t b[64]; // input buffer
	uint32_t h[8]; // chained state
	uint32_t t[2]; // total number of bytes
	size_t c;      // pointer for b[]
	size_t outlen; // digest size
} blake2s_ctx;

The libcommon library in tillitis-key1-apps has a wrapper for using this function called blake2s().

Applications

See our apps repo for examples of client and TKey apps as well as libraries for writing both.