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This paper outlines the vision for a new type of software-shaped platforms, or SOSH platforms for short, that can be implemented in commercial CPU+FPGA platforms. At the core of the SOSH paradigm is the idea of exposing direct control over the flow of data exchanged between hardware components in embedded Systemon-Chips (SoC). Data flow manipulation primitives are synthesized in reprogrammable hardware and interposed between central processors, memory modules, and I/O devices. A new layer of system software is then introduced to leverage such primitives and to achieve fine-grained control and introspection over the interaction of SoC resources. By turning memory and I/O data flows into manageable entities, a new degree of internal awareness can be achieved in complex systems. We first review recent works that are well aligned with the concept of data flow manipulation primitives that can be deployed in SOSH platforms. Next, we outline future research avenues concerning the use of the SOSH paradigm for workload profiling and prediction, to implement advanced memory models, and to perform security threat identification and mitigation.
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Serberus: Protecting Cryptographic Code from Spectres at Compile-Time
We present SERBERUS, the first comprehensive mitigation for hardening constant-time (CT) code against Spectre attacks (involving the PHT, BTB, RSB, STL, and/or PSF speculation primitives) on existing hardware. SERBERUS is based on three insights. First, some hardware control-flow integrity (CFI) protections restrict transient control-flow to the extent that it may be comprehensively considered by software analyses. Second, conformance to the accepted CT code discipline permits two code patterns that are unsafe in the post-Spectre era. Third, once these code patterns are addressed, all Spectre leakage of secrets in CT programs can be attributed to one of four classes of taint primitives—instructions that can transiently assign a secret value to a publicly-typed register. We evaluate SERBERUS on cryptographic primitives in the OPENSSL, LIBSODIUM, and HACL* libraries. SERBERUS introduces 21.3% runtime overhead on average, compared to 24.9% for the next closest state-of-the-art software mitigation, which is less secure.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2236855
- PAR ID:
- 10490369
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE Computer Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
- ISSN:
- 2375-1207
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-3130-1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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