CAREER: Architectural Enhancement and Design Methodologies for Secure Processing in Embedded Systems

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法III-5）资助的。随着嵌入式系统在我们的日常生活和基础设施中的广泛使用，加强嵌入式系统在其设计和实现中的安全性已成为研究界的一个重要优先事项。这个项目的目标是增强处理器架构的运行时安全处理。由于架构支持可以对上层软件透明，因此新的软件安全攻击无法轻易绕过它。同时，处理器内的变化提供了很高的效率。我们正在追求三个研究目标，以解决由软件攻击造成的随机内存损坏。首先，我们探索有效的架构增强嵌入式处理器，以监控代码的完整性，并将监视器在一个现实的专用指令集处理器（ASIPs）的设计流程。其次，我们利用处理器的嵌入式推测架构作为合法行为的缓存来验证程序控制流，保护控制数据和决策数据。在关键点对程序执行验证进行采样，以减少性能下降。第三，我们将单核环境中的架构支持扩展到更复杂和越来越流行的多核平台。一套CAD设计工具将向公众免费发布。我们的方法将导致一个真实的影响现代安全嵌入式处理器的设计。该项目还将促进跨多学科研究和教育的整合，公共政策研究所特别热衷于促进传统上代表性不足的少数民族和妇女参与这些领域。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law III-5).With pervasive usage of embedded systems in our daily life and infrastructures, strengthening the security of embedded system in its design and implementation has become a critical priority for the research community. This project targets augmenting the processor architecture for run-time secure processing. Since the architectural support can be made transparent to upper-level software, it cannot be easily circumvented by new software security attacks. Meanwhile, in-processor changes offer great efficiency. We are pursuing three research objectives to address random memory corruption caused by software attacks. First, we explore effective architectural augmentations of embedded processors to monitor code integrity, and incorporate the monitor in a realistic application-specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) design flow. Second, we utilize the embedded speculative architectures of processors as a cache for legitimate behaviors to validate program control flow, protecting control data and decision-making data. The program execution validations are sampled at critical points to reduce the performance degradation. Third, we scale architectural support in a single-core environment up to more sophisticated and increasingly popular multi-core platforms. A suite of CAD design tools will be released to public for free use. Our approach will lead to a real impact on modern secure embedded processor design. The project will also facilitate the integration of research and education across multiple disciplines, and the PI is especially keen on promoting participation of traditionally underrepresented minorities and women in such domains.