Evolvable Approaches to Software Verification and Validation

摘要

This project considered software protection in embedded systems built using encrypted execution platforms where instructions and data are stored in encrypted form in memory. The objective of this project was to develop architectural solutions to address physical attacks on such encrypted platforms when a sophisticated attacker has captured the device. The attacks are based on exploiting structure in the application code and data, which can be uncovered by direct manipulation of hardware. An integrated hardware- software approach was taken to design a secure system to protect against such attacks. The architecture utilizes a secure on-chip hardware component, in the form of a Field-Programmable Gate Array, as the main protection mechanism. The reconfigurable logic in hardware, when combined with the ability of the compiler to instrument the code, was used in powerful ways to strengthen the security of computing platforms. Several techniques, in architecture, compiler and security, were proposed and designed. Simulations and prototyping experiments showed that this approach is feasible, easy to implement and on average adds low performance overheads. The research involved faculty and graduate students, and partly supported two doctoral theses.