Lionel Torres

Hardware Mechanisms for Memory Authentication: A Survey of Existing Techniques and Engines

Trusted computing platforms aim to provide trust in computations performed by sensitive applications. Verifying the integrity of memory contents is a crucial security service that these platforms must provide since an adversary able to corrupt the memory space can affect the computations performed by the platform. After a description of the active attacks that threaten memory integrity, this paper surveys existing cryptographic techniques --- namely integrity trees --- allowing for memory authentication. The strategies proposed in the literature for implementing such trees on general-purpose computing platforms are presented, along with their complexity. This paper also discusses the effect of a potentially compromised Operating System (OS) on computing platforms requiring memory authentication and describes an architecture recently proposed to provide this security service despite an untrusted OS. Existing techniques for memory authentication that are not based on trees are described and their performance/security trade-off is discussed. While this paper focuses on memory authentication for uniprocessor platforms, we also discuss the security issues that arise when considering data authentication in symmetric multiprocessor (shared memory) systems.

TEC-Tree: A Low-Cost, Parallelizable Tree for Efficient Defense Against Memory Replay Attacks

Replay attacks are often the most costly attacks to thwart when dealing with off-chip memory integrity. With a trusted System-on-Chip, the existing countermeasures against replay require a large amount of on-chip memory to provide tamper-proof storage for metadata such as hash values or nonces. Tree-based strategies can be deployed to reduce this unacceptable overhead; for example, the well-known Merkle tree technique decreases this overhead to a single hash value. However, it comes at the cost of performance-killing characteristics for embedded systems --- e.g. non-parallelizable hash computations on tree updates. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution: the Tamper-Evident Counter Tree (TEC-Tree). It allows for tamper-evident off-chip storage of the nonces involved in a replay countermeasure; TEC-Tree parallelizes the computations involved in both the authentication and tree update processes. Moreover, because our tree relies on block encryption, it provides data confidentiality at no extra cost. TEC-Tree is a deployable solution for memory integrity, with low performance hit and hardware cost.

A parallelized way to provide data encryption and integrity checking on a processor-memory bus

This paper describes a novel engine, called PE-ICE (parallelized encryption and integrity checking engine), enabling to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of data exchanged between a SoC (system on chip) and its external memory. The PE-ICE approach is based on an existing block-encryption algorithm to which the integrity checking capability is added. Simulation results show that the performance overhead of PE-ICE remains low (below 4%) compared to block-encryption-only systems (which provide data confidentiality only)

A non-volatile run-time FPGA using thermally assisted switching MRAMS

This paper describes the integration of a thermally assisted switching magnetic random access memory (TAS-MRAM) in FPGA design. The non-volatility of the latter is achieved through the use of magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJ) in the MRAM cell. A thermally assisted switching scheme is used to write data in the MTJ device, which helps to reduce power consumption during write operation in comparison to the writing scheme in classical MTJ device. Plus, the non-volatility of such a design should reduce both power consumption and configuration time required at each power up of the circuit in comparison to classical SRAM based FPGAs. A real time reconfigurable (RTR) micro-FPGA using TAS-MRAM allows dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms, while featuring simple design architecture.

Hardware Engines for Bus Encryption: A Survey of Existing Techniques

The widening spectrum of applications and services provided by portable and embedded devices brings a new dimension of concerns in security. Most of those embedded systems (pay-TV, PDAs, mobile phones, etc.) make use of external memory. As a result, the main problem is that data and instructions are constantly exchanged between memory (RAM) and CPU in clear form on the bus. This memory may contain confidential data like commercial software or private contents, which either the end-user or the content provider is willing to protect. The paper describes the problem of processor-memory bus communications in this regard and the existing techniques applied to secure the communication channel through encryption. Performance overheads implied by those solutions are discussed extensively.

An Adaptive Message Passing MPSoC Framework

Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips (MPSoCs) offer superior performance while maintaining flexibility and reusability thanks to software oriented personalization. While most MPSoCs are today heterogeneous for better meeting the targeted application requirements, homogeneous MPSoCs may become in a near future a viable alternative bringing other benefits such as run-time load balancing and task migration. The work presented in this paper relies on a homogeneous NoC-based MPSoC framework we developed for exploring scalable and adaptive on-line continuous mapping techniques. Each processor of this system is compact and runs a tiny preemptive operating system that monitors various metrics and is entitled to take remapping decisions through code migration techniques. This approach that endows the architecture with decisional capabilities permits refining application implementation at run-time according to various criteria. Experiments based on simple policies are presented on various applications that demonstrate the benefits of such an approach.

Temperature-Aware Distributed Run-Time Optimization on MP-SoC Using Game Theory

With forecasted hundreds of processing elements (PE), future embedded systems will be able to handle multiple applications with very diverse running constraints. In order to avoid hot-spots and control the temperature of the tiles, dynamic voltage-frequency scaling (DVFS) can be applied at PE level. At system level, it implies to dynamically manage the different voltage-frequency couples of each PE in order to obtain a global optimization. In this article we present an approach based on game theory, which adjusts at run-time the frequency of each PE. It aims at reducing the tile temperature while maintaining the synchronization between the tasks of the application graph. A fully distributed scheme is assumed in order to build a scalable mechanism. Results show that the proposed run-time algorithm find solutions in few calculation cycles achieving temperature reductions of about 23%.

New nonvolatile FPGA concept using magnetic tunneling junction

This paper describes a real time reconfigurable (RTR) micro-FPGA using new non volatile memory. Magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJ) used in magnetic random access memories (MRAM) are compatible with classical CMOS processes. Moreover remanent property of such a memory could limit configuration time and power consumption required at each power up of the device. Each configuration memory point has to be readable independently from each other, which makes this approach radically different from the classical memory array one

Evaluating the impact of task migration in multi-processor systems-on-chip

This paper presents a Multi-Processor System-on-Chip platform which is capable of load balancing at run-time. The system is purely distributed in the sense that each processor is capable of making decisions on its own, without having relying by any central unit. All the management is ensured by a very tiny preemptive RTOS (run-time operating system) running on every processor which is mainly responsible for running and distributing tasks among the processing elements (PEs). The goal of such strategy is to improve the performance of the system while ensuring scalability of the design. In order to validate the concepts, we have conducted some experiments with a widely used multimedia application: the MJPEG (Motion JPEG) decoder. Obtained results show that the overhead caused by the task migration mechanism is amortized by the gain in term of performance.

Non-volatile run-time field-programmable gate arrays structures using thermally assisted switching magnetic random access memories

This study describes the integration of thermally assisted switching magnetic random access memories (TAS-MRAMs) in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) design. The non-volatility is achieved through the use of magnetic tunnelling junctions (MTJs) in an MRAM cell. A TAS scheme is used to write data in the MTJ device, which helps to reduce power consumption during a write operation in comparison with the conventional writing scheme used in MTJ devices. Furthermore, the non-volatility allows reducing both power consumption and configuration time required at each power-up of the circuit in comparison with classical static random access memory-based FPGAs. An innovative architecture furthermore provides run-time reconfigurable (RTR) support at minimum area overhead. A RTR FPGA element using TAS-MRAM allows dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms, while featuring simple design architecture.