CAREER: Designing and Defending Novel Ultra-stealthy and Controllable Design-time Analog-domain Hardware Trojans

硬件设计人员构建电路时利用了数字抽象，其中只存在值1和0。虽然这简化了电路操作，但它隐藏了许多实际操作细节。在真实的世界中，电路的行为是连续的，电压范围在0和更高的电平之间。由于工作环境变化、电路老化和计算，电压会在短期和长期内波动。传统上，硬件设计人员和攻击者都忽略了这些底层细节。该项目表明，利用现有的数字设计技术，可以利用这些低级行为来创建新的硬件攻击，并提出防御措施来应对它们。该项目改变了政府和行业的硬件设计人员如何推理和验证其设计的安全性。通过利用模拟域效应来增加隐身性，该项目代表了硬件木马能力的根本变化。该项目的两个重要成果是硬件木马隐身的新维度，即可再现性，并揭示了在硬件描述语言级别利用模拟域属性的能力。该项目的工件是一个基于现场可编程门阵列的片上系统，它演示了新型模拟域硬件木马，并作为一个防御评估平台，代表商品系统。该项目汇集了计算机安全，计算机体系结构和数字电路领域的研究，以创建新型设计时硬件木马和新的防御它们。其他更广泛的影响包括将技术工作的影响扩展到社会，与政府实验室和行业建立伙伴关系，并为下一代领导者提供指导，特别是那些在家庭中第一个获得大学学位的人。该项目还将通过将研究成果整合到课程中并创建嵌入式安全设计体验，在本科生和研究生教育中发挥作用。该项目存储库将无限期地向公众开放https://github.com/FoRTE-Research/NSF_CAREER。该存储库将包含复制和扩展研究结果所需的所有硬件和软件系统的代码。实验数据将存储在进行模拟和实验的实验室设备上，并使用外部媒体进行备份以进行存档存储。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Hardware designers build circuits leveraging the digital abstraction where only values 1 and 0 exist. While this simplifies circuit operation, it hides a lot of real-world operational details. In the real world, circuits behave continuously, with voltages ranging between 0 and some higher level. Voltage fluctuates in the short- and long-term due to the operating environment changes, circuit age, and computation. Traditionally, both hardware designers and attackers have ignored these low-level details. This project shows that it is possible to harness these low-level behaviors, using existing digital design techniques, to create new hardware attacks and proposes defenses to counteract them.This project changes how hardware designers across government and industry reason about and validate the security of their designs. By exploiting analog-domain effects for increased stealth, the project represents a fundamental change in the capabilities of hardware Trojans. Two significant outcomes of the project are a new dimension of hardware Trojan stealth, namely reproducibility, and exposing the ability to harness analog-domain properties at the hardware description language level. The artifacts of this project are a Field-Programmable Gate Array-based System-on-Chip that demonstrates the novel analog-domain hardware Trojans as well as serves as a defense evaluation platform, representative of commodity systems.This project brings together research in the areas of computer security, computer architecture, and digital circuits to create novel design-time hardware Trojans and new defenses against them. Other broader impacts include extending the technical work's impact to society, developing partnerships with government labs and industry, and providing mentorship to the next generation of leaders, especially those who are the first in their family to get a college degree. The project will also play a role in undergraduate and graduate education through the integration of the research artifacts into the curriculum and the creation of an embedded security design experience.The project repository will be indefinitely available to the public https://github.com/FoRTE-Research/NSF_CAREER. This repository will contain the code for all hardware and software systems need to reproduce and extend the research results. Experimental data will be stored on the laboratory devices where the simulation and experiments are conducted, as well as being backed-up using external media for archival storage.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.