TWC: Small: Employing Information Theoretic Metrics to Quantify and Enhance the Security of Hardware Designs

计算设备控制着我们周围的世界。它们为智能手机、厨房电器、汽车、电网、医疗设备以及我们日常生活中依赖的许多其他物体供电。这些系统的基础是硬件，它是复杂的数十亿晶体管芯片。获得对硬件的控制，可以不受限制地访问系统的每个部分。这使得它成为攻击者极具吸引力的目标。受损的硬件允许未经授权的用户获取个人信息，并可用于强制设备进入不安全和潜在威胁生命的场景。因此，开发能够实现安全硬件设计的技术是至关重要的。创建安全硬件需要设计者评估潜在的漏洞。目前，很难具体地说明硬件的安全性（或缺乏安全性）。该项目正在开发定量的硬件安全度量，使设计人员能够精确地评估系统的安全性。团队正在尝试通过对硬件不同部分存在的不确定性和信息流的数量采用统计度量来实现这一点。这些指标与所考虑的变量类型无关。因此，团队可以评估与机密性和完整性以及隐蔽通道相关的功能安全属性。这些指标能够描述系统中可能容易受到攻击的部分。它们决定了缓解技术对系统整体安全的有效性。最终的结果是更安全的硬件，从而导致更安全的计算设备。

Computing devices control much of the world around us. They power smart phones, kitchen appliances, cars, power grids, medical devices, and many of the other objects that we rely upon in our everyday lives. The foundation of these systems is the hardware, which are complex multi-billion transistor chips. Gaining control of the hardware provides unfettered access to every part of the system. This makes it a highly attractive target for attackers. Compromised hardware allows unauthorized users to obtain personal information, and can be used to force the device into unsafe and potentially life threatening scenarios. Thus, it is paramount to develop techniques to enable secure hardware design.Creating secure hardware requires the designer to assess potential vulnerabilities. Currently it is hard to concretely say anything about the security (or lack thereof) of the hardware. This project is developing quantitative hardware security metrics that enable designers to precisely evaluate the security of the system. The team is attempting this by employing statistical measures on the amount of uncertainty and information flow that is present across different portions of the hardware. These metrics are oblivious to the types of variables under consideration. Thus, the team can assess both functional security properties related to confidentiality and integrity as well as covert channels. These metrics enable the characterization of portions of the system that are potentially vulnerable to attacks. And they determine the effectiveness of mitigation techniques on the overall security of the system. The end result is more secure hardware, which leads to safer and more secure computing devices.