Secure Admission of Applications in Many-cores

Abstract

The adoption of many-cores systems makes the concern for data protection a critical design requirement. A secure application that processes sensitive data may have its security harmed by a malicious process. The literature contains several proposals to protect many-cores against attacks, focusing for example in the protection of the application execution or the access to shared memories. However, a complete solution, covering the entire application lifetime is a gap to be fulfilled. Designers must follow these steps to protect the execution of an application: provide a secure admission process; give to the application a protected environment to execute; protect the access to memory and peripherals. The article main goal is to cover the secure admission by using mutual authentication, and Message Authentication Code (MAC) to guarantee the integrity of applications during the object code transfer. This work also presents the protocol to cover the other steps, proposing a complete framework to execute applications with security constraints in many-cores. The evaluation shows that the mutual authentication in a phase previous to the object code transmission, minimize the latency to start a secure application and there is a latency dependency relative to the MAC verification with the object code size. After the MAC verification, the application starts its execution in a secure environment.