Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) are notoriously insecure. Hence, the fundamental security feature of IP isolation is heavily used, e. g., secured Memory Mapped IOs (MMIOs), or secured address ranges in case of memories, are marked as non-accessible. One way to provide strong assurance of security is to define isolation as information flow policy in hardware using the notion of non-interference. Since, an insecure hardware opens up the door for attacks across the entire system stack (from software down to hardware), the security validation process should start as early as possible in the SoC design cycle, i. e. at Electronic System Level (ESL). Hence, in this paper we propose the first dynamic information flow analysis at ESL. Our approach allows to validate the run-time behavior of a given SoC implemented using Virtual Prototypes (VPs) against security threat models, such as information leakage (confidentiality) and unauthorized access to data in a memory (integrity). Experiments show the applicability and efficacy of the proposed method on various VPs including a real-world system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.