SaTC: STARSS: ICM: Invariant Carrying Machine for Hardware Assurance

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

Overview: Semiconductor-based hardware is the foundation of interconnected and intelligent systems--from personal computers and mobile phones to Internet, financial, energy, and other critical infrastructure systems. As we increasingly depend upon these systems in our everyday lives, their trustworthiness and security are more critical than ever. Since the software trustworthiness can only be built upon the trustworthiness of hardware, the assurance and security of hardware has become an important problem that cannot be avoided. Design and manufacture of complex semiconductor circuits and systems requires many steps, and one design could involve hundreds of engineers,typically distributed across multiple locations and organizations worldwide. Moreover, the deployment of IP blocks from different sources has become a common practice. The conventional processes and tools for design and manufacture of semiconductors at most ensure the correctness, that is, the resulting product does what it is supposed to do. However, to date, these processes do not provide confidence about whether the chip is altered such that it provides unauthorized access or control. Such undesirable behavior can be due to a weakness in the design that results in an unintentional side channel or due to maliciously inserted Trojan hardware. In this research, we propose one approach called Invariant-Carrying Machine (ICM) for hardware assurance. This approach is based on the concept of light-weight formal method and only requires minor additions over the conventional design process. In this approach, each design will carry with it an inductive invariant that is used to guarantee its security. When receiving a design from the third party or after a complex design process, the user can check whether the circuit inductively satisfies the invariant and whether the invariant satisfies the security rules. Any violation will raise a red flag for deploying the design. The project will in
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date10/1/149/30/17

Funding

  • Semiconductor Research Corporation (2014-TS-2559)

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