Biblio

Hardware vulnerabilities are often due to design mistakes because the designer does not sufficiently consider potential security vulnerabilities at the design stage. As a result, various security solutions have been developed to protect ICs, among which the language-based hardware security verification serves as a promising solution. The verification process will be performed while compiling the HDL of the design. However, similar to other formal verification methods, the language-based approach also suffers from scalability issue. Furthermore, existing solutions either lead to hardware overhead or are not designed for vulnerable or malicious logic detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a new language based framework, QIF-Verilog, to evaluate the trustworthiness of a hardware system at register transfer level (RTL). This framework introduces a quantified information flow (QIF) model and extends Verilog type systems to provide more expressiveness in presenting security rules; QIF is capable of checking the security rules given by the hardware designer. Secrets are labeled by the new type and then parsed to data flow, to which a QIF model will be applied. To demonstrate our approach, we design a compiler for QIF-Verilog and perform vulnerability analysis on benchmarks from Trust-Hub and OpenCore. We show that Trojans or design faults that leak information from circuit outputs can be detected automatically, and that our method evaluates the security of the design correctly.

Automotive systems have always been designed with safety in mind. In this regard, the functional safety standard, ISO 26262, was drafted with the intention of minimizing risk due to random hardware faults or systematic failure in design of electrical and electronic components of an automobile. However, growing complexity of a modern car has added another potential point of failure in the form of cyber or sensor attacks. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that vulnerability in vehicle's software or sensing units could enable them to remotely alter the intended operation of the vehicle. As such, in addition to safety, security should be considered as an important design goal. However, designing security solutions without the consideration of safety objectives could result in potential hazards. Consequently, in this paper we propose the notion of security for safety and show that by integrating safety conditions with our system-level security solution, which comprises of a modified Kalman filter and a Chi-squared detector, we can prevent potential hazards that could occur due to violation of safety objectives during an attack. Furthermore, with the help of a car-following case study, where the follower car is equipped with an adaptive-cruise control unit, we show that our proposed system-level security solution preserves the safety constraints and prevent collision between vehicle while under sensor attack.