Hardware-assisted Adaptive Cross-Layer Security for Computing Systems

Introduction

Today's computing systems are facing an unprecedented security threat posed by recent attacks that use software to exploit hardware vulnerabilities, as shown by attacks like Spectre, Meltdown, Foreshadow, and follow-ups. These attacks affect a wide range of computing platforms and manufacturers, including Intel, AMD, and ARM.

Cross-Layer Attacks

These cross-layer attacks reach far beyond exploiting microarchitectural vulnerabilities and allow unprivileged software to exploit a variety of hardware design and implementation flaws. This was demonstrated in the world's largest System-on-Chip (SoC) security competition that we have been conducting with Intel since 2018.

Paradigm Shift in Security

This adversarial paradigm shift sidesteps decades of security research that assumed a layered architecture where hardware is flawless and trustworthy. Existing solutions, such as:

1. Software patching
2. Specific hardware changes

are ad-hoc, expensive, or only mitigate specific known attacks. Particularly, patching hardware after fabrication is very limited or impossible.

Proposal Overview

This proposal, HYDRANOS, envisions hardware-assisted adaptive security, a radically different approach to enable flexible security for future computing systems.

Project Goals

We aim to:

• Design, prototype, and evaluate dedicated configurable hardware inside the SoC design
• Enable post-fabrication reconfiguration of key security-relevant hardware primitives to mitigate new attack vectors

Moreover, we provide an evaluation framework that includes novel hardware fuzzing techniques to significantly improve existing hardware-vulnerability detection methods at design time.

Impact of HYDRANOS

HYDRANOS is a game changer for trustworthy computing. It allows us to fundamentally and flexibly tackle today’s and future cross-layer attacks on security-critical systems. Additionally, it provides novel research to pave the way towards future-proof security.

Community Engagement

We will showcase our results on open-source hardware widely supported by academia and industry and provide it to the research community, allowing open verification by third parties.