Early SoCs Information Flow Policies Validation Using SystemC-Based Virtual Prototypes at the ESL

Abstract

Virtual Prototypes (VPs) at the Electronic System Level (ESL) are being increasingly adopted by the semiconductor industry and play an important role in modernizing the System-on-Chips (SoCs) design flow to raise design productivity and reduce time-to-market constraints. Due to their early availability and significantly faster simulation speed in comparison to Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs, VPs are used as reference models for lower levels of abstraction. Leveraging VPs and extending their use-cases for early security validation are shown as a promising direction. As the cost of fixing any security flaws increases with the stage of development, VP-based security validation can significantly avoid costly iterations. In this paper, we present a novel VP-based dynamic information flow analysis approach at the ESL, consisting of three main phases which are run-time behavior extraction (in terms of transactions), transactions transformation, and security validation. The proposed approach empowers designers to validate the information flow policies of a given VP-based SoC against the most occurring security threat models which are information leakage (confidentiality) and unauthorized access to data in a memory (integrity). Experimental results including an extensive set of standard benchmarks and two real-world VP-based SoCs demonstrate the scalability and applicability of the proposed approach.