Virtual Platform to Analyze the Security of a System on Chip at Microarchitectural Level

Abstract

The processors (CPUs) embedded in System on Chip (SoC) have to face recent attacks taking advantage of vulnerabilities/features in their microarchitectures to retrieve secret information. Indeed, the increase in complexity of modern CPU and SoC is mainly driven by the seek of performance rather than security. Even if efforts like isolation techniques have been taken to thwart cyberattacks, most microarchitectural features can open the door to security holes. One typical example is the exploitation of cache memory which keeps track of the program execution and paves the way to side-channel (SCA) analysis and transient execution attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, which take advantage of speculative execution. This paper introduces an ongoing study aiming at analyzing the attacks relying on the hardware vulnerabilities of the microarchitectures of CPUs and SoCs. The main objective is to create a virtual and open platform that simulates the behavior of microarchitectural features and their interactions with the peripherals, like accelerators and memories in emerging technologies. The gem5 simulator, whose configuration can be customized to a specific CPU or SoC architecture, is the basis of our chosen platform for security analysis.