Mobile devices are in roles where the integrity and confidentiality of their apps and data are of paramount importance. They usually contain a System-on-Chip (SoC), which integrates microprocessors and peripheral Intellectual Property (IP) connected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC). Malicious IP or software could compromise critical data. Some types of attacks can be blocked by controlling data transfers on the NoC using Memory Management Units (MMUs) and other access control mechanisms. However, commodity processors do not provide strong assurances regarding the correctness of such mechanisms, and it is challenging to verify that all access control mechanisms in the system are correctly configured. We propose a NoC Firewall (NoCF) that provides a single locus of control and is amenable to formal analysis. We demonstrate an initial analysis of its ability to resist malformed NoC commands, which we believe is the first effort to detect vulnerabilities that arise from NoC protocol violations perpetrated by erroneous or malicious IP.
Other works have proposed encryption and integrity monitoring for sensitive code and data in main memory @cite_60 @cite_66 . These confidentiality and integrity enforcement techniques do not address access control for peripherals and any unencrypted data, so it is still important to implement such access control in a verifiable manner.
@cite_66 @cite_60
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We present Bastion, a new hardware-software architecture for protecting security-critical software modules in an untrusted software stack. Our architecture is composed of enhanced microprocessor hardware and enhanced hypervisor software. Each trusted software module is provided with a secure, fine-grained memory compartment and its own secure persistent storage area. Bastion is the first architecture to provide direct hardware protection of the hypervisor from both software and physical attacks, before employing the hypervisor to provide the same protection to security-critical OS and application modules. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of bypassing an untrusted commodity OS to provide application security and shows better security with higher performance when compared to the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the current industry state-of-the-art security chip. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation on the OpenSPARC platform. Vulnerabilities in complex software are a major threat to the security of today's computer systems, with the alarming prevalence of malware and rootkits making it difficult to guarantee security in a networked environment. Due to the widespread application of information technology to all aspects of society, these vulnerabilities threaten virtually all aspects of modern life. To protect software and data against these threats, we describe simple extensions to the Power Architecture for running Secure Executables. By using a combination of cryptographic techniques and context labeling in the CPU, these Secure Executables are protected on disk, in memory, and through all stages of execution against malicious or compromised software, and other hardware. Moreover, we show that this can be done efficiently, without significant performance penalty. Secure Executables can run simultaneously with unprotected executables; existing applications can be transformed directly into Secure Executables without changes to the source code.