학술논문

Secure-by-Construction Design Methodology for CPUs: Implementing Secure Speculation on the RTL
Document Type
Conference
Source
2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on. :1-9 Oct, 2023
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Engineering Profession
General Topics for Engineers
Signal Processing and Analysis
Threat modeling
Out of order
Microarchitecture
Design methodology
Pipelines
Hardware
Iterative methods
Language
ISSN
1558-2434
Abstract
Spectre and Meltdown attacks proved Transient Execution Side Channels to be a notable challenge for designing secure microarchitectures. Various countermeasures against these threats were proposed on the electronic system level. However, addressing all possible attack scenarios requires the design and analysis of bit-and cycle-accurate implementations. We present a novel secure-by-construction RTL design methodology based on a new hardware protection framework underpinned by a generic control infrastructure that can be integrated into industry-grade microarchitectures. The methodology uses formal verification to systematically detect possible leakage paths and to customize the generic infrastructure accordingly for the design. We propose an iterative flow which semi-automatically leads to an RTL design that is guaranteed to be secure w.r.t. transient execution attacks. A case study for the methodology is conducted on BOOMv3, an open-source RISC-V processor with a deep out-of-order pipeline, and the resulting secure RTL design is benchmarked on an FPGA setup. Our design outperforms a design based on conservative countermeasures, improving the incurred overhead by $\boldsymbol{3}\times/\boldsymbol{4}\times$ (depending on the threat model) while maintaining the same level of security.