Hardware-software design methods for security and reliability of MPSoCs

摘要

Security of a Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC) is an emerging area of concern in embedded systems. MPSoC security is jeopardized by Code Injection attacks. Code Injection attacks, which are the most common types of software attacks, have plagued single processor systems. Design of MPSoCs must therefore incorporate security as one of the primary objectives. Code Injection attacks exploit vulnerabilities in rusted" and legacy code.An architecture with a dedicated monitoring processor (MONITOR) is employed to simultaneously supervise the application processors on an MPSoC. The program code in the application processors is divided into basic blocks. The basic blocks in the application processors are statically instrumented with special instructions that allow communication with the MONITOR at runtime. The MONITOR verifies the execution of all the processors at runtime using control flow checks and either a timing or instruction count check.This thesis proposes a monitoring system called SOFTMON, a design methodology called SHIELD, a design flow called LOCS and an architectural framework called CUFFS for detecting Code Injection attacks. SOFTMON, a software monitoring system, uses a software algorithm in the MONITOR. SOFTMON incurs limited area overheads. However, the runtime performance overhead is quite high. SHIELD, an extension to the work in SOFTMON overcomes the limitation of high runtime overhead using a MONITOR that is predominantly hardware based.LOCS uses only one special instruction per basic block compared to two, as was the case in SOFTMON and SHIELD. Additionally, profile information is generated for all the basic blocks in all the application processors for the MPSoC designer to tune the design by increasing or decreasing the frequency of loop basic blocks.CUFFS detects attacks even without application processors communicating to the MONITOR. The SOFTMON, SHIELD and LOCS approaches can only detect attacks if the application processors communicate to the MONITOR. CUFFS relies on the exact number of instructions in basic blocks to determine an attack, rather than time-frame based measures used in SOFTMON, SHIELD and LOCS.The lowest runtime performance overhead was achieved by LOCS (worst case of 37.5%), while the SOFTMON monitoring system had the least amount of area overheads of about 25%. The CUFFS approach employed an active MONITOR and hence detected a greater range of attacks.The CUFFS framework also detects bit flip errors (reliability errors) in the control flow instructions of the application processors on an MPSoC. CUFFS can detect nearly 70% of all bit flip errors in the control flow instructions.Additionally, a modified CUFFS approach is proposed to ensure reliable inter-processor communication on an MPSoC. The modified CUFFS approach uses a hardware based checksum approach for reliable inter-processor communication and incurred a runtime performance overhead of up to 25% and negligible area overheads compared to CUFFS.Thus, the approaches proposed in this thesis equip an MPSoC designer with tools to embed security features during an MPSoC's design phase. Incorporating security measures at the processor design level provides security against software attacks in MPSoCs and incurs manageable runtime, area and code-size overheads.