Projektbeschreibung
Nachhaltige Sicherheit für Rechensysteme
Bei den jüngsten Angriffen wurde Software eingesetzt, um Hardware-Schwachstellen für den Diebstahl sensibler Informationen auszunutzen, Schutzmechanismen zu umgehen oder sogar das gesamte Computersystem zu kompromittieren. Zu diesen sogenannten schichtenübergreifenden Schwachstellen zählen bekannte Angriffe wie Spectre, Meltdown und Foreshadow. Sie betreffen ein breites Spektrum von Computerplattformen, von Low-End-Geräten bis hin zu Serversystemen verschiedener Architekturen und Anbieter wie Intel, AMD und ARM. Ein entscheidender Aspekt ist, dass sie traditionelle Bedrohungsmodelle widerlegen, die sich hauptsächlich auf reine Software-Schwachstellen konzentrieren. Bestehende Lösungen wie Software-Patches oder spezifische Hardwareänderungen sind ad hoc, teuer oder nur gegen bestimmte Angriffe wirksam. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt HYDRANOS plant, für die identifizierten wichtigen sicherheitsrelevanten Hardware-Komponenten spezielle konfigurierbare Designs zu entwickeln. Diese Komponenten gestatten es der Computerplattform, sich an veränderte Bedrohungsmodelle anzupassen.
Ziel
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 - affecting a wide range of computing platforms and manufacturers, including Intel, AMD, and ARM. These cross-layer attacks reach far beyond exploiting microarchitectural vulnerabilities and allow unprivileged software to exploit a variety of hardware design and implementation flaws, as we demonstrated in the world's largest System-on-Chip (SoC) security competition that we have been conducting with Intel since 2018. This adversarial paradigm shift sidesteps decades of security research that assumed a layered architecture where hardware is flawless and trustworthy. Existing solutions, such as software patching or specific hardware changes are ad-hoc, expensive, or only mitigate specific known attacks. Particularly, patching hardware after fabrication is very limited or impossible.
This proposal, HYDRANOS, envisions hardware-assisted adaptive security, a radically different approach to enable flexible security for future computing systems. We aim to design, prototype, and evaluate dedicated configurable hardware inside the SoC design to 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.
HYDRANOS is a game changer for trustworthy computing, allows to fundamentally and flexibly tackle today’s and future cross-layer attacks on security-critical systems, and provides novel research to pave the way towards future-proof security. 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.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedGastgebende Einrichtung
64289 Darmstadt
Deutschland