TWC: Medium: HARDWARE-ASSISTED LIGHTWEIGHT CAPABILITY OPTIMIZATION (HALCYON)

TWC：中：硬件辅助轻量级功能优化（HALCYON）

• 批准号: 1513687
• 负责人: Jonathan Smith
• 金额: $ 120万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2019-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1513687&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: TWC; Medium; HARDWARE; ASSISTED; LIGHTWEIGHT

To address today's environment of constant security challenges and cyber-threats, the Hardware-Assisted Lightweight Capability Optimization (HALCYON) research explores novel techniques to make the performance of more secure system designs acceptable to users. Conventional system designs have achieved acceptable performance, but have evolved from hardware and software designs that carry forward compromises in security that made sense in the past, but not with modern hardware resources in today's security climate. HALCYON uses an approach, called "capabilities", that provides better control of information sharing and protection in computer systems than today's architectures. Capability access control is preferred by many security experts, but conventional wisdom holds that it is too slow to be used in practice. If HALCYON is successful, a new generation of fundamentally more secure software systems will be enabled, at little to no cost in performance. HALCYON research explores hardware acceleration of selected operations in the use of per-object access controls in an object-oriented programmer-controlled protection model based on capabilities. The measurement and data driven exploration is based on understanding the quantitative benefits of hardware acceleration on microkernels such as L4 that are used in mobile phones and other devices. Examples of hardware accelerations include lightweight support for fat pointers ("low-fat pointers"), object pointers with associated access control specifications. Such fat pointers, which have been designed, validated and implemented, can protect units as small as individual memory words. As an initial example, the project is using measurements to identify the impact of this hardware acceleration. Measurement data from the quantitative exploration allows the researchers to identify both worthwhile hardware accelerations and opportunities for operating system restructuring that exploit those accelerations.

为了应对当今不断的安全挑战和网络威胁的环境，硬件辅助轻量级能力优化（HALCYON）研究探索了新的技术，使用户可以接受更安全的系统设计的性能。传统的系统设计已经实现了可接受的性能，但是已经从硬件和软件设计发展而来，这些硬件和软件设计在过去有意义，但是在今天的安全环境中不具有现代硬件资源。HALCYON使用了一种称为“能力”的方法，它提供了比当今体系结构更好的信息共享控制和计算机系统保护。能力访问控制是许多安全专家的首选，但传统观点认为它太慢，无法在实践中使用。如果HALCYON成功，新一代的软件系统将从根本上更加安全，而性能成本很低。HALCYON的研究探讨了在基于能力的面向对象程序员控制的保护模型中使用每个对象访问控制时所选操作的硬件加速。测量和数据驱动的探索是基于对微内核（例如，在移动的电话和其他设备中使用的L4）上的硬件加速的量化益处的理解。 硬件加速的示例包括对胖指针（“低脂指针”）、具有相关联的访问控制规范的对象指针的轻量级支持。这种已经设计、验证和实现的胖指针可以保护小到单个存储器字的单元。作为初始示例，该项目正在使用测量来确定这种硬件加速的影响。定量探索的测量数据使研究人员能够识别有价值的硬件加速和利用这些加速进行操作系统重组的机会。