Thwarting Software Attacks on Data-Intensive Platforms with Configurable Hardware-Assisted Application Rule Enforcement

Security is difficult to achieve on general-purpose computing platforms due to their complexity, excess functionality, and resource sharing. An alternative is the creation of a Tailored Trustworthy Space for the system or application class of interest. We focus on data-intensive computing systems using reconfigurable hardware to implement streaming operations, and provide security assurances that are independent of application software, middleware, or operating system integrity and correctness. All interaction between software and the dataflow hardware passes through an automatically synthesized and formally verified hardware controller incorporating enforcement and real-time monitoring of application-specific rules. Abstractions provided by the Blue spec high-level language assist in the translation of domain-specific policy rules to synthesized logic. For the cognitive radio example used, hardware-enforced policies include physical layer rules such as sanctioned spectrum usage. Policy changes cause the secure generation and transfer of a new controller-wrapped datapath hardware plug-in. Datapath dynamic block swaps and cryptographic operations are managed entirely by the hardware controller rather than software drivers. Design for performance and design for security are therefore simultaneously addressed since the datapath is configured and monitored at hardware speeds, and software has no access to datapath configurations and cryptographic keys.