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Hardware-assisted Adaptive Cross-Layer Security for Computing Systems

Descripción del proyecto

Seguridad sostenible para los sistemas informáticos

Los ataques recientes han utilizado programas informáticos que aprovechan las vulnerabilidades del «hardware» con el fin de robar información sensible, eludir los mecanismos de protección o incluso comprometer todo un sistema informático. Estas vulnerabilidades llamadas «de capa cruzada» incluyen ataques bien conocidos como Spectre, Meltdown y Foreshadow. Afectan a una amplia gama de plataformas informáticas, desde dispositivos de gama baja hasta sistemas de servidores de diferentes arquitecturas y proveedores, como Intel, AMD y ARM. Lo más importante es que refutan los modelos tradicionales de amenazas centrados principalmente en las vulnerabilidades del «software». Las técnicas existentes, como la aplicación de revisiones en el «software» o cambios específicos en el «hardware», son «ad hoc», costosas o solo eficaces contra ciertos ataques. El equipo del proyecto HYDRANOS, financiado con fondos europeos, planea crear diseños configurables específicos para los componentes de «hardware» identificados como importantes para la seguridad. Estos componentes facilitarán que la plataforma informática se adapte a los cambiantes modelos de amenaza.

Objetivo

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.

Institución de acogida

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT DARMSTADT
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 2 485 281,00
Dirección
KAROLINENPLATZ 5
64289 Darmstadt
Alemania

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Región
Hessen Darmstadt Darmstadt, Kreisfreie Stadt
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 2 485 281,00

Beneficiarios (1)