CPA-CSA: BLUE CHIP: Security Defenses for Misbehaving Hardware

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of the BlueChip project is to develop security defenses against malicious hardware. Hardware and software are functional equivalents. To date, computer security problems have generally been attacks or exploitations of software systems. However, the sophistication and complexity of hardware systems is now great enough that many opportunities for malice exist in the path from design to realization. This project will be the first to demonstrate the feasibility of Intelligent Malicious Processors (IMPs). Initial investigations indicate that small hardware alterations can be used to bootstrap many varieties of malicious behavior into existence, such as hardware supported access to privileged operation. Such misbehaving hardware has outsized system effects, because software designers depend on (i.e., trust) hardware to perform correctly, and therefore do not defend against malicious hardware. One may address these problems, in principle, by tightly controlling each step and handoff in the path from design to realization (sometimes called the "supply chain''). A superior solution is to presume that attackers will overcome these technical and procedural hurdles, and to build defenses. BlueChip will develop new architectural approaches to defending against a wide variety of malicious hardware. For example, BlueChip will develop a family of anomaly detection schemes for processors that can detect malicious hardware and trigger remediations.