CRII: SaTC: Detecting Security Vulnerabilities in Instruction Set Architectures

CRII：SaTC：检测指令集架构中的安全漏洞

• 批准号: 1464209
• 负责人: Cynthia Sturton
• 金额: $ 17.5万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-05-15 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1464209&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CRII; SaTC; Detecting; Security; Vulnerabilities

The interaction between computer processors -- the hardware at the heart of our computers, tablets, and phones -- and software -- apps, web browsers, and other applications -- is governed by an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The ISA is the specification that defines how the processor will respond to commands from the software. It is large and complex, too large for a person to understand and reason about all the interactions between different parts completely. As a result, security vulnerabilities exist in the ISA. These vulnerabilities can sometimes be exploited by attackers to steal data or take control of the machine. This research is about detecting security vulnerabilities that exist in the ISA. Finding and removing these vulnerabilities will create a more secure foundation for all our computing activities. This will benefit government agencies that require high assurance environments, cloud providers that rely on hardware features for the security for their service, and users who, more and more, are relying on diverse hardware components from a variety of hardware design companies to handle their private and sensitive data.The researchers posit that vulnerabilities in the ISA happen in one of two ways: 1) Erroneous specification: the ISA prescribes behavior that is dangerous; or 2) Nondeterminism in the specification: the ISA is incomplete and one of the possible behaviors allowed by the specification is dangerous. The hypothesis of this research is that it is possible to focus on a relatively small subset of the ISA for which these types of errors are likely to occur. The researchers are developing a practical methodology for discovering for which instructions vulnerabilities are most likely to occur. With that information, they are developing tools to detect and correct security-critical errors in the ISA. In addition to making a practical contribution, the research activities are improving understanding in the computer science community of what a vulnerability in an ISA looks like and where and under what conditions it is likely to occur. This will enable future verification efforts to concentrate on the most security-critical aspects of the ISA.

计算机处理器之间的交互 ​​- 计算机，平板电脑和电话的核心 - 以及软件 - 应用程序，Web浏览器和其他应用程序 - 由指令集体系结构（ISA）控制。 ISA是定义处理器如何响应软件命令的规范。它既大又复杂，太大了，以至于一个人完全理解和理解不同部分之间的所有相互作用。结果，ISA中存在安全漏洞。攻击者有时可以利用这些漏洞来窃取数据或控制机器。这项研究是关于检测ISA中存在的安全漏洞。查找和消除这些漏洞将为我们的所有计算活动创造更安全的基础。这将使需要高保证环境的政府机构，依靠硬件功能为其服务安全的云提供商以及越来越多的用户依靠各种硬件设计公司的各种硬件组件来处理其私人研究人员认为，ISA中的脆弱性以两种方式之一发生：1）错误规范：ISA规定了危险的行为；或2）规范中的无确定性：ISA不完整，规范允许的可能行为之一是危险的。 这项研究的假设是，可以专注于可能发生这些类型错误的ISA的相对较小的子集。 研究人员正在开发一种实用方法，以发现最有可能发生的指令漏洞。有了这些信息，他们正在开发工具以检测和纠正ISA中的关键安全错误。 除了做出实际贡献外，研究活动还在改善计算机科学界的理解，即ISA中的脆弱性以及可能发生的条件下以及在哪里以及在哪里以及在哪里发生。这将使未来的验证工作专注于ISA的最关键安全方面。