STARSS: Small: Collaborative: Practical and Scalable Security Verification of Security-Aware Hardware Architectures

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Computers form the backbone of any modern society, and often process large amounts of sensitive and private information. To help secure the software, and the sensitive data, a number of secure hardware-software and processor architectures have been proposed. These architectures incorporate novel protection and defense mechanisms directly in the hardware where they cannot be modified or bypassed, unlike software protections. However, due to lack of practical and scalable security verification tools and methodologies, very few of the proposed hardware security architectures have been commercially deployed. This project develops a security verification methodology that is applicable to different hardware-software security architectures. This project develops security invariants and methodology that hardware architects can deploy to check the security properties of their architectures in a scalable and semi-automated manner. The methodology is applied to verify hardware-enhanced isolation architectures and architectures that minimize the attack surface in cloud computing. Verification of a secure cache's resistance to cache side channel attacks is also investigated. Researchers and designers will have a new method to systematically check their designs, and show to others the conditions under which they work. Hardware manufacturers will gain assurance to actually implement these security architectures in real products. In turn, customers will gain assurance about the secure hardware that protects their computations running on their devices or virtual machines running on remote cloud servers. Security architectures are important to customers and hardware manufacturers, however, security verification is needed to make them a reality.