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Codebook

Include Codes

RQ1

  • Hazards of unprotected firmware

    • IP theft and perceivable benefit for attackers
    • Affect the growth of the device industry
    • Broader negative impact for company
    • Affect critical operations in embedded devices
    • Hard-to-Mitigate characteristics in embedded devices
    • Extract information about cloud server
    • Maliciously manipulate firmware
    • Other: Unlock paid/premium features

  • What makes firmware important

    • Product piracy
    • User privacy
    • Security risks
    • Cloud server information
    • Innovative features

RQ2

  • Which devices will be protected

    • Products with innovative features, such as those powered by artificial intelligence (AI)
    • Products with high ROI(Return On Invest)
    • Specific types of products, such as automobiles, medical supplies, and military products
    • Products targeting overseas markets

  • What makes developers actively enable protection

    • Compliance
    • Company regulations
    • Customer requirements
    • Leaders' requirements
    • Customary practice

  • Which devices will not be protected

    • Cost-constrained products
    • Products based on open-source components
    • Customer products with low security requirements

  • Why firmware is not protected

    • The absence of protection awareness among developers
    • The high cost of protections
    • The benefits outweigh the risks
    • Don't believe firmware can cause security problems
    • Reactive security posture: protection only triggered after a breach/incident occurs
    • Depend on External parties

  • What makes attack overall more practical in practice

    • Development misoperations due to technological immaturity
    • Developers skip security for convenience
    • Developers lack protection mechanism knowledge
    • Mature commercial chip-cracking services available online at transparent prices

  • What makes attacks on devices less important

    • User can mitigate
    • OTA can fix vulnerabilities in firmware
    • Only for certain scenarios (e.g, LAN network)
    • IoT devices are authenticated by cloud
    • Firmware tightly coupled to specific hardware, limiting portability/reuse by attackers
    • Less important consequence
    • Other: All data are saved online

RQ3

  • What costs does enabling protection add?
    • More time and higher costs during development
    • Extra performance cost
    • Extra production tools
    • Debug and Failure Analysis Constraints
    • Higher repair cost
    • Additional security modules or chips
    • Key management operational overhead

RQ4

  • Limitations of protections

    • For developers: Hard to use
    • For developers: Hard to get guidance
    • For Vendor: Cause performance loss
    • For Vendor: Increase total cost

  • Developers' needs for protection mechanisms provided by chip vendors

    • The documentation is rich and easily accessible
    • It is simple to enable
    • It features high security
    • Factory rollback can be performed
    • Integrated hardware crypto acceleration with more algorithm support
    • Strengthen Supply-Chain Assurance

  • Developer' needs for support from the industry and the policy

    • Hoped that regulations will be issued to curb counterfeiting, piracy, and intellectual property infringement
    • Expected unified security standards

Excluded Codes

  • Enterprise security organization

    1. Security tasks integrated into technical KPIs
    2. Legal department involved in privacy rule-making
    3. Security department operational workflows
    4. Vulnerability accountability and incentive systems

  • Product lifecycle and supply chain management

    1. Cross-category product lifecycle variability
    2. Lifecycle-stage-driven security strategy differences
    3. Isolation between development and production
    4. Higher security risk of test firmware
    5. Security feature reuse across product lines
    6. USB token quota-based OEM key delivery model
    7. Key leakage risk variation by factory scale

  • Attacker motivations

    1. Hobbyist
    2. Grey market
    3. Competitor

  • Product background information

    1. Specific product types
    2. Specific chip/platform models
    3. Storage architecture (e.g. eMMC, UFS)
    4. Specific industry backgrounds
    5. Material substitution leads to premature failure