Towards Property Driven Hardware Security

Abstract

Secure hardware design is a challenging task due to the fact that security properties are difficult or impossible to model and subsequently verify using traditional hardware design tools. The "state of the art" for hardware design security relies heavily on functional verification, manual inspection, and code review to identify security vulnerabilities. This labor intensive process significantly reduces productivity while proving no guarantee that a security flaw will be identified. In this paper, we describe a property driven approach to hardware security, which allows automatic synthesis and verification of both qualitative and quantitative security properties. We address hardware security by enforcing information flow and statistical security properties. By incorporating a new security property specification language, such security properties can be specified, translated and verified using hardware design tools. We present design examples to demonstrate our property driven hardware security solution for proving isolation, detecting timing channel, eliminating hardware Trojan, and enforcing security related statistical properties.