Processor Hardware Security Vulnerabilities and their Detection by
Unique Program Execution Checking
release_rlrjzmclinh43h72u6y3tt6la4
by
Mohammad Rahmani Fadiheh, Dominik Stoffel, Clark Barrett, Subhasish
Mitra, Wolfgang Kunz
2018
Abstract
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre
and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware.
The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"
that reveal secret data without any explicit information flow between the
secret and the attacker. Many sources believe that such covert channels are
intrinsic to highly advanced processor architectures based on speculation and
out-of-order execution, suggesting that such security risks can be avoided by
staying away from high-end processors. This paper, however, shows that the
problem is of wider scope: we present new classes of covert channel attacks
which are possible in average-complexity processors with in-order pipelining,
as they are mainstream in applications ranging from Internet-of-Things to
Autonomous Systems.
We present a new approach as a foundation for remedy against covert channels:
while all previous attacks were found by clever thinking of human attackers,
this paper presents an automated and exhaustive method called "Unique Program
Execution Checking" which detects and locates vulnerabilities to covert
channels systematically, including those to covert channels unknown so far.
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