CAREER: Untrusted Computing Base: Detecting and Removing Malicious Hardware

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Computer systems security is an arms race between defenders andattackers that has mainly been confined to softwaretechnologies. Increases in the complexity of hardware and the risingnumber of transistors per chip have created opportunities forhardware-based security threats. Among the most pernicious aremalicious hardware footholds inserted at design time, which anattacker can use as the basis of a computer system attack.This project explores of the feasibility of foothold attacks and afundamental design-time methodology for defending against them.First, this project looks at techniques for highlighting potentiallymalicious circuits in a design automatically. The basic algorithm,called dead circuit identification (DCI), analyzes hardwaredescription language source code and dynamic execution traces ofdesign verification tests to identify suspicious circuitry whoseresults do not impact the computation.The second aspect of this project is a system for removing suspiciouscircuits from a design automatically. The dead circuit elimination(DCE) tool removes suspicious circuits from a design by pushingpotentially malicious logic up to a higher layer where it can beanalyzed in more detail at runtime.The third aspect of this project is a new technique for generatingtest cases and perturbing existing test cases to search specificallyfor potentially malicious circuits.This project provides a pathway to detection and defense againstsecurity risks from hardware comprising attacks, making the enormousdisruptions possible with such attacks far more difficult than today.