CAPcelerate: Capabilities for Heterogeneous Accelerators

该项目旨在扩展CHERI计算机处理器体系结构提供的硬件安全能力，以涵盖“加速器”——为加速特定专业任务而设计的硬件。今天，加速器的构造方式与通用处理器不同，而且越来越多的加速器可以根据需要插入计算机（例如通过Thunderbolt连接）。考虑到加速器或其软件是由不可信的代理设计的，或者是加载了恶意软件，我们希望构建加速器可以安全地与计算机系统通信的新方法。这种保护将为大多数依赖加速器进行性能操作的当前计算系统提供全系统安全性。它还将使用户能够安全地在他们的系统中添加加速器，因为他们知道自己不会暴露于安全漏洞之中。作为该项目的一部分，我们将构建加速器的软件和硬件模型，并评估安全性和性能的潜在保护，旨在设计有效和安全的保护机制。

This project seeks to extend the capability hardware security provided by the CHERI computer processor architecture to cover 'accelerators' - hardware designed for speeding up particular specialised tasks. Today accelerators are constructed in a different way to general-purpose processors and increasingly they can be plugged into computers as needed (for instance via a Thunderbolt connection). We wish to architect new ways in which accelerators may communicate with computer systems safely, considering if the accelerator or its software were designed by an untrustworthy agent, or malicious software were loaded on to it. Such protection would provide whole-system security to most current computing systems which depend on accelerators for performant operation. It would also enable users to add accelerators to their system safe in the knowledge that they are not opening themselves up to security vulnerabilities. As part of this project we will build software and hardware models of accelerators and evaluate potential protections for security and performance, aiming to design efficient and secure protection mechanisms.