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Shared memory system-on-chips (SM-SoCs) are ubiquitously employed by a wide range of computing platforms, including edge/IoT devices, autonomous systems, and smartphones. In SM-SoCs, system-wide shared memory enables a convenient and cost-effective mechanism for making data accessible across dozens of processing units (PUs), such as CPU cores and domain-specific accelerators. Due to the diverse computational characteristics of the PUs they embed, SM-SoCs often do not employ a shared last-level cache (LLC). Although covert channel attacks have been widely studied in shared memory systems, high-throughput communication has previously been feasible only by relying on an LLC or by possessing privileged or physical access to the shared memory subsystem. In this study, we introduce a new memory-contention-based covert communication attack, MC3, which specifically targets shared system memory in mobile SoCs. Unlike existing attacks, our approach achieves high-throughput communication without the need for an LLC or elevated access to the system. We explore the effectiveness of our methodology by demonstrating the trade-off between the channel transmission rate and the robustness of the communication. We evaluate MC3 on NVIDIA Orin AGX, NX, and Nano platforms and achieve transmission rates up to 6.4 Kbps with less than 1% error rate. 

Shared memory system-on-chips (SM-SoCs) are ubiquitously employed by a wide range of computing platforms, including edge/IoT devices, autonomous systems, and smartphones. In SM-SoCs, system-wide shared memory enables a convenient and cost-effective mechanism for making data accessible across dozens of processing units (PUs), such as CPU cores and domain-specific accelerators. Due to the diverse computational characteristics of the PUs they embed, SM-SoCs often do not employ a shared last-level cache (LLC). Although covert channel attacks have been widely studied in shared memory systems, high-throughput communication has previously been feasible only by relying on an LLC or by possessing privileged or physical access to the shared memory subsystem. In this study, we introduce a new memory-contention-based covert communication attack, MC3, which specifically targets shared system memory in mobile SoCs. Unlike existing attacks, our approach achieves high-throughput communication without the need for an LLC or elevated access to the system. We explore the effectiveness of our methodology by demonstrating the trade-off between the channel transmission rate and the robustness of the communication. We evaluate MC3 on NVIDIA Orin AGX, NX, and Nano platforms and achieve transmission rates up to 6.4 Kbps with less than 1% error rate. 

Regular expressions are pervasive in modern systems. Many real world regular expressions are inefficient, sometimes to the extent that they are vulnerable to complexity-based attacks, and while much research has focused on detecting inefficient regular expressions or accelerating regular expression matching at the hardware level, we investigate automatically transforming regular expressions to remove inefficiencies. We reduce this problem to general expression optimization, an important task necessary in a variety of domains even beyond compilers, e.g., digital logic design, etc. Syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS) with a cost function can be used for this purpose, but ordered enumeration through a large space of candidate expressions can be prohibitively expensive. Equality saturation is an alternative approach which allows efficientconstruction and maintenance of expression equivalence classes generated by rewrite rules, but the procedure may not reach saturation, meaning global minimality cannot be confirmed. We present a new approach called rewrite-guided synthesis (ReGiS), in which a unique interplay between SyGuS and equality saturation-based rewriting helps to overcome these problems, resulting in an efficient, scalable framework for expression optimization. 

The energy and latency demands of critical workload execution, such as object detection, in embedded systems vary based on the physical system state and other external factors. Many recent mobile and autonomous System-on-Chips (SoC) embed a diverse range of accelerators with unique power and performance characteristics. The execution flow of the critical workloads can be adjusted to span into multiple accelerators so that the trade-off between performance and energy fits to the dynamically changing physical factors. In this study, we propose running neural network (NN) inference on multiple accelerators of an SoC. Our goal is to enable an energy-performance trade-off with an by distributing layers in a NN between a performance- and a power-efficient accelerator. We first provide an empirical modeling methodology to characterize execution and inter-layer transition times. We then find an optimal layers-to-accelerator mapping by representing the trade-off as a linear programming optimization constraint. We evaluate our approach on the NVIDIA Xavier AGX SoC with commonly used NN models. We use the Z3 SMT solver to find schedules for different energy consumption targets, with up to 98% prediction accuracy.