CAREER: Enabling Robust and Adaptive Architectures through a Decoupled Security-Centric Hardware/Software Stack

现代系统日益复杂，对我们全面评估威胁和及时部署缓解措施的能力造成了很大限制。根据谷歌的Project Zero，每隔17天就会在野外发现一个新的漏洞，尽管所有供应商平均需要15天来修补漏洞，这突显了现有解决方案无法适应快速变化的威胁格局。该项目采取了一种全新的方法，开发了一个与指令集体系结构(ISA)分离的以安全为中心的整体硬件/软件堆栈，以使软件能够动态地将表达的安全策略推送到硬件，在硬件中，这些策略可以通过新的硬件设计机制透明而高效地按需和现场实施，而不需要重新编译、重新部署和频繁的硬件升级。这项工作预计将显著增强现代体系结构在它们可以缓解的漏洞范围和类型方面的稳健性、多功能性、灵活性和适应性，同时将缓解时间和部署成本降至最低。该项目还将通过(A)针对高中生、大学生和专业学生的课程开发和道德黑客研讨会，(B)开发社区研究基础设施和评估试验台，以快速评估安全政策，以及(C)在与安全相关的项目上为本科生和代表性不足的学生提供研究指导，以满足提高国家网络安全劳动力的迫切需求。该项目需要三个协同研究推力，共同实现一个全面的、跨堆栈的系统解决方案，以及时缓解漏洞。第一个推力将开发一个分离的以安全为中心的硬件/软件接口，以允许软件捕获系统中不同主体和对象之间的交互和关系，并以逻辑公式的形式指定一组富有表现力的安全策略，以减轻从内存和类型安全到瞬时执行攻击的广泛硬件和软件攻击。第二个推力将开发新的硬件设计机制和微码原语，以评估和执行软件中指定的安全策略，同时保持高水平的性能，对功率和面积的影响最小。第三个推力将开发创新的基于硬件的属性跟踪机制，以在执行期间透明地跟踪高级软件属性的流动，以增强底层硬件执行机制的有效性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The growing complexity in modern systems has placed substantial limits on our ability to comprehensively assess threats and deploy timely mitigations. According to Google’s Project Zero, a new exploit is discovered in the wild every 17 days, although it takes an average of 15 days across all vendors to patch a vulnerability, highlighting the inability of existing solutions to scale with the rapidly evolving threat landscape. This project takes a radically new approach by developing a holistic security-centric hardware/software stack that is decoupled from the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), so as to empower software to dynamically push expressive security policies to hardware, where they can be transparently and efficiently enforced on-demand and in-the-field through novel hardware design mechanisms, without the need for recompilation, redeployment, and frequent hardware upgrades. This work is expected to significantly enhance robustness, versatility, flexibility, and adaptability of modern architectures in the range and types of exploits they can mitigate, while simultaneously minimizing both the time to mitigation and the cost of deployment. This project will also address the urgent need to boost the nation’s cybersecurity workforce through (a) curriculum development and ethical hacking workshops targeted at high school, college, and professional students, (b) development of community research infrastructure and evaluation testbeds for rapid assessment of security policies, and (c) research mentorship of undergraduate and underrepresented students on security-related projects. This project entails three synergistic research thrusts that together enable a holistic full system across-the-stack solution for timely mitigation of exploits. The first thrust will develop a decoupled security-centric hardware/software interface to allow software to capture interactions and relationships among the different subjects and objects in the system and specify an expressive set of security policies in the form of logic formulas, to mitigate a wide range of hardware and software attacks ranging from memory and type safety to transient execution attacks. The second thrust will develop novel hardware design mechanisms and microcode primitives to evaluate and enforce the security policies specified in software, while maintaining high levels of performance with minimal impact on power and area. The third thrust will develop innovative hardware-based attribute tracking mechanisms to transparently track the flow of high-level software attributes, during execution, to enhance the effectiveness of the underlying hardware enforcement mechanisms.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.