Aker: A Design and Verification Framework for Safe and Secure SoC Access Control

Restuccia, Francesco; Meza, Andrés; Kastner, Ryan

doi:10.1109/iccad51958.2021.9643538

Cited by 20 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Aker is a design and verification framework for developing hardware access control systems [16]. Aker is built upon two pillars: the Access Control Wrapper (ACW) and a property-driven security verification [11].…”

Section: Aker Access Control Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discuss the IPlevel verification in the following. The security verification for the firmware and system behaviors follows a similar procedure [16].…”

Section: Aker Access Control Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3) Articulate Common Weaknesses: We identified 17 CWEs relevant to the IP-level verification [16]. The first group relates to the Manager AXI interface.…”

Section: Aker Access Control Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automating hardware security property generation

Kastner

Restuccia

Meza

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference

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Security verification is an important part of the hardware design process. Security verification teams can uncover weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and flaws. Unfortunately, the verification process involves substantial manual analysis to create the threat model, identify important security assets, articulate weaknesses, define security requirements, and specify security properties that formally describe security requirements upon the hardware. This work describes current hardware security verification practices. Many of these rely on manual analysis. We argue that the property generation process is a first step towards scalable and reproducible hardware security verification.

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Section: Aker Access Control Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discuss the IPlevel verification in the following. The security verification for the firmware and system behaviors follows a similar procedure [16].…”

Section: Aker Access Control Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automating hardware security property generation

Kastner

Restuccia

Meza

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference

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“…It offers a baseline for weakness identification, mitigation, and prevention efforts. This formulation of security properties, especially with regard to the Radix Coverage Guide, is described in greater detail by Restuccia et al (2021) specifically for access control.…”

Section: Security Properties For Isadoramentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ware designs put forth byRestuccia et al (2021) for the AKER access control module. An early developmental verison of AKER is studied by Isadora throughout this chapter.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining Secure Behavior of Hardware Designs

Deutschbein

2021

Preprint

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Calvin Deutschbein: Mining Secure Behavior of Hardware Designs (Under the direction of Cynthia Sturton)Hardware presents an enticing target for attackers attempting to gain access to a secured computer system. Software-only exploits of hardware vulnerabilities may bypass software level security features. Hardware must be made secure. However, to understand whether a hardware design is secure, security specifications must be generated to define security on that design.Micro-architectural design elements, undocumented or under-documented features, debug interfaces, and information-flow side channels all may introduce new vulnerabilities. The secure behavior of each must be specified in order ensure the design meets its security requirements and contains no vulnerabilities. However, manual efforts can be overwhelmed by design complexity, and many hardware vulnerabilities, such as Memory Sinkhole, SYSRET privilege escalation, and most recently Spectre/Meltdown, persisted in product lines for decades despite extensivetesting. An automated solution is needed to specify secure designs. Specification mining offers a solution by automating security specification for hardware. Specification miners use a form of machine learning to specify behaviors of a system by studying a system in execution. However, specification mining was first developed for use with software. Complex hardware designs offer unique challenges for this technique. Further, specification miners traditionally capture functional specifications without a notion of security, and may not use the specification logics necessary to describe some security requirements.This work demonstrates specification mining for hardware security. On CISC architectures such as x86, I demonstrate that a miner partitioning the design state space along control signals discovers a specification that includes manually defined properties and, if followed, would secure CPU designs against Memory Sinkhole and SYSRET privilege escalation. For temporal propiii

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Information Flow Verification

Sturton¹,

Kastner²

2022

Handbook of Computer Architecture

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Aker: A Design and Verification Framework for Safe and Secure SoC Access Control

Cited by 20 publications

References 23 publications

Automating hardware security property generation

Automating hardware security property generation

Mining Secure Behavior of Hardware Designs

Information Flow Verification

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