SHF: Small: Rethinking Computer Architecture for Secure and Resilient Systems

我们的社会、经济和国家安全严重依赖于计算机和计算设备。只需几跳，商用计算机和移动电话就可以连接到秘密或敏感信息或关键基础设施。然而，在过去的30年或更长的时间里，主流的商用计算机在设计时都没有考虑到安全性。相反，它们的设计目的是提高性能、能源效率、成本或规模，并在事后增加安全性。虽然已经建造了一些专门的安全计算机，但到目前为止，人们不得不为了安全而牺牲性能(或成本和便利性)。在这项研究中，PI计划探索如果我们允许自己进行一种全新的设计，其中安全是一流的目标，与性能和其他目标相同，那么什么是可行的。这项研究将从基本原则出发重新思考计算机体系结构，以显著提高未来计算机的安全性和性能。这项研究有两个主题：如何设计计算机体系结构以实现更安全的软件和系统，以及如何设计本身更值得信赖的计算机硬件组件。PI将为计算机体系结构开发一种新的基于威胁的设计方法，研究如何在计算的每个基本方面的设计中建立安全意识。将为安全处理、安全内存、安全缓存、安全虚拟内存转换、安全存储和安全控制流开发新的架构基础。研究将侧重于提供安全的基石：关键信息的机密性和完整性以及可用性，即使在系统的某些部分可能已被破坏的情况下，也能弹性证明和执行安全关键任务。除了软件安全解决方案和当前最先进的硬件TPM(可信平台模块)解决方案所考虑的软件和网络攻击外，这些解决方案还将考虑硬件攻击。这项研究的智力贡献将是新的体系结构基础，以及所有未来计算机研究和开发中“基于威胁的设计”的新维度。这项研究的更广泛影响是提供可以内置到商用计算设备及其服务器中的核心安全技术。这些系统可用于计算机、通信、控制、娱乐和嵌入式系统，以构建更安全的系统，从而实现信息和网络安全的飞跃，造福于我们的社会。

Our society, economy and national security are critically dependent on computers and computing devices. With a few hops, commodity computers and mobile phones can be connected to secret or sensitive information or to critical infrastructures. However, mainstream commodity computers have not been designed with security in mind, for the last three or more decades. Rather, they have been designed to improve performance, energy efficiency, cost or size, with security added on as an after-thought. While some specialized secure computers have been built, up to now, one had to sacrifice performance (or cost and convenience) for security. In this research, the PI plans to explore what is feasible if we allow ourselves a clean-slate design, where security is a first-class goal, on par with performance and other goals. The investigation will rethink computer architecture from first principles to significantly improve both the security and the performance of future computers.The research has two thrusts: how to design computer architecture to enable more secure software and systems, and how to design computer hardware components that are themselves more trustworthy. The PI will develop a new threat-based design methodology for computer architecture, examining how to build security awareness into the design of each basic aspect of computing. New architectural foundations for secure processing, secure memories, secure caches, secure virtual memory translation, secure storage, and secure control flow will be developed. The research will focus on providing the cornerstones of security: Confidential and Integrity of critical information, and Availability, in the sense of resilient attestation and execution of security-critical tasks even when parts of the system may have been corrupted. The solutions will also consider hardware attacks, in addition to the software and network attacks considered by software security solutions and the current state-of-the-art hardware TPM (Trusted Platform Module) solution. The intellectual contributions of this research will be new architectural foundations, and a new dimension of "threat-based design" in the research and development of all future computers. The broader impact of this research is to provide core security technology that can be built into commodity computing devices and their servers. These can be used in computer, communications, control, entertainment and embedded systems to build significantly more secure systems that will provide a leap forward in information and cyber security, benefiting our society.