PROCOMON: An Automatically Generated Predictive Control Signal Monitor

Abstract

Today security and safety applications are often a large conglomerate of complex different components. Because of a strong trend to high system integration to fulfill financial and production cost constraints, as much of these components as possible are combined to form large-scale system-on-chips. Risks of dependability and security problems caused by device degradation and adversaries lead to a wide range of research concerning fault detection and recovery techniques in recent years. Especially in safety systems the concurrent use of different checking techniques, to protect the integrity of the operation, is preferred. Standard duplication or triplication methods for such critical devices are not completely fulfilling this property and raising a need for new on-line testing and recovery methodologies. Furthermore, the smart-card sector produces a strong need for new checking techniques with a low resource footprint. Therefore, this paper presents a novel automatized hardware generation flow to create a predictive control signal monitor unit in an automatized way. Depending on the instruction loaded by the processor pipeline this unit will predict the signature of following control signal changes. Hence, a new way of fault detection, weak checking, is implemented without introducing any large additional hardware blocks. A case study using an open-source processor is also presented to show the applicability of our approach.