Abstract

1 . We examine the concept of security as a dimension of Quality of Service in distributed systems. Implicit to the concept of Quality of Service is the notion of choice or variation. Security services also offer a range of choice both from the user perspective and among the underlying resources. We provide a discussion and examples of user-specified security variables and show how the range of service levels associated with these variables can support the provision of Quality of Security Service, whereby security is a constructive network management tool rather than a performance obstacle. We also discuss various design implications regarding security ranges provided in a QoS-aware distributed system.

A wide range of security services may be available to applications in a heterogeneous computer network environment. Resource Management Systems (RMSs) responsible for assigning computing and network resources to tasks need to know the resource-utilization costs associated with the various network security services. In order to understand the range of security services an RMS needs to manage, a preliminary security service taxonomy is defined. The taxonomy is used as a framework for defining the costs associated with network security services.

High assurance systems used in avionics, medical implants, and cryptographic devices often rely on a small trusted base of hardware and software to manage the rest of the system. Crafting the core of such a system in a way that achieves flexibility, security, and performance requires a careful balancing act. Simple static primitives with hard partitions of space and time are easier to analyze formally, but strict approaches to the problem at the hardware level have been extremely restrictive, failing to allow even the simplest of dynamic behaviors to be expressed.Our approach to this problem is to construct a minimal but configurable architectural skeleton. This skeleton couples a critical slice of the low level hardware implementation with a microkernel in a way that allows information flow properties of the entire construction to be statically verified all the way down to its gate-level implementation. This strict structure is then made usable by a runtime system that delivers more traditional services (e.g. communication interfaces and long-living contexts) in a way that is decoupled from the information flow properties of the skeleton. To test the viability of this approach we design, test, and statically verify the information-flow security of a hardware/software system complete with support for unbounded operation, inter-process communication, pipelined operation, and I/O with traditional devices. The resulting system is provably sound even when adversaries are allowed to execute arbitrary code on the machine, yet is flexible enough to allow caching, pipelining, and other common case optimizations.

NSF Not applicableApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Securing the supply chain of integrated circuits is of the utmost importance to computer security. In addition to counterfeit microelectronics, the theft or malicious modification of designs in the foundry can result in catastrophic damage to critical systems and large projects. In this Technical Report, we describe a 3D architecture that splits a design into two separate tiers: one tier that contains critical security functions is manufactured in a trusted foundry; another tier is manufactured in an unsecured foundry. We argue that a split manufacturing approach to hardware trust based on 3D integration is viable and provides several advantages over other approaches.Hardware-oriented security and trust, 3D integration, trustworthy system development, policy enforcement, cryptographic hardware, embedded systems security, malicious hardware, trusted foundries AbstractSecuring the supply chain of integrated circuits is of the utmost importance to computer security. In addition to counterfeit microelectronics, the theft or malicious modification of designs in the foundry can result in catastrophic damage to critical systems and large projects. In this Technical Report, we describe a 3D architecture that splits a design into two separate tiers: one tier that contains critical security functions is manufactured in a trusted foundry; another tier is manufactured in an unsecured foundry. We argue that a split manufacturing approach to hardware trust based on 3D integration is viable and provides several advantages over other approaches.