University of California

Tortuga Logic Inc.

Ryan Kastner

Jason K Oberg

Timothy Sherwood

Wei Hu

Jonathan Valamehr

Ali Umut Irturk

Armaiti Ardeshiricham

Mohit Tiwari

Sarah Meiklejohn

Disclosed are devices, apparatuses, systems, computer readable media, and methods for improving the security of circuitry designs using HDL code. In one aspect a method is disclosed. the method includes receiving a hardware design language (HDL) representation of a circuit; inserting flow tracking into the HDL representation, wherein the flow tracking adds one or more security labels that are tracked throughout the circuit; and generating an enhanced HDL representation of the circuit, wherein the enhanced HDL representation comprises the HDL representation and the flow tracking, wherein the enhanced representation including the one or more security labels that are tracked throughout the circuit enables a security determination a model for tracking timing-based information flows through HDL code is disclosed. The disclosed technology is used to verify security properties on a variety of equipment including crypto cores, bus architectures, caches and arithmetic modules.

Techniques for improving security of circuitry designs based on a hardware description language

The present disclosure includes systems and methods relating to information flow tracking and detection of unintentional design flaws of digital devices and microprocessor systems. In general, in one implementation, a technique includes: receiving a hardware design specifying an implementation for information flow in a hardware configuration; receiving one or more labels annotating the hardware design; receiving one or more security properties specifying a restriction relating to the one or more labels for implementing an information flow model; generating the information flow model; performing verification using the information flow model, wherein verification comprises verifying whether the information flow model passes or fails against the one of more security properties; and upon verifying that the information flow model passes, determining that an unintentional design flaw is not identified in the hardware design.

Method and system for detecting hardware trojans and unintentional design flaws

The present disclosure includes systems and techniques relating to information flow and hardware security for digital devices and microprocessor systems. In general, in one implementation, a technique includes: receiving a hardware design specifying an implementation for information flow in a hardware configuration; receiving one or more labels annotating the hardware design; receiving a security property specifying a restriction relating to the one or more labels for implementing a secure information flow in the hardware configuration; designating each of the one or more labels to a corresponding security level in accordance with the specified restriction; and automatically assigning a respective value to each of the one or more labels in the hardware design, wherein each respective value is determined in accordance with the corresponding security level designated for each of the one or more labels.

Generating hardware security logic

A preferred method for providing multi-level security to a gate level information flow receives or specifies a security lattice having more than two security levels. The security lattice defines how security levels relate to each other. A hardware design implementing information flows including flows having security levels specified by the security lattice is received. Logic is created for testing the hardware design in view of the security lattice. A logic function is created based upon the hardware design and the logic for testing to implement the security lattice. Another method receives a hardware design in a hardware description language. At least a portion of the hardware design is synthesized to gate level primitives. Functional component tracking logic supporting more than two-security levels is built from the gate level primitives. Functional components in the hardware design are simulated with the functional component tracking logic.

Method and system providing mutli-level security to gate level information flow

A method for detecting a timing channel in a hardware design includes synthesizing the hardware design to gate level. Gate level information flow tracing is applied to the gate level of the hardware design via a simulation to search for tainted flows. If a tainted flow is found, a limited number of traces are selected. An input on the limited number of traces is simulated to determine whether the traces are value preserving with respect to taint inputs, and to determine that a timing flow exists if the traces are value preserving with respect to the taint inputs.

Method and systems for detecting and isolating hardware timing channels

Techniques, structures, and systems are disclosed for implementing an efficient design of computer hardware using a top-to-bottom approach. In one aspect, a method for designing a processor includes generating an initial architecture for a processor to execute algorithms, simulating execution of the algorithms by the initial architecture to determine a modification to the initial architecture, and creating a processor design based on the modification to the initial architecture. The described method for implementing a hardware design tool provides a push-button transition from high level specification for algorithms to hardware description language.

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San Diego, CA, United States of America

Ryan Kastner