QTFlow: Quantitative Timing-Sensitive Information Flow for Security-Aware Hardware Design on RTL

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Reimann, Lennart M., Prashar, Anshul, Ghinami, Chiara, Pelke, Rebecca, Sisejkovic, Dominik, Merchant, Farhad, Leupers, Rainer
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929234962808832
author Reimann, Lennart M.
Prashar, Anshul
Ghinami, Chiara
Pelke, Rebecca
Sisejkovic, Dominik
Merchant, Farhad
Leupers, Rainer
author_facet Reimann, Lennart M.
Prashar, Anshul
Ghinami, Chiara
Pelke, Rebecca
Sisejkovic, Dominik
Merchant, Farhad
Leupers, Rainer
contents In contemporary Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, security often takes a backseat to the primary goals of power, performance, and area optimization. Commonly, the security analysis is conducted by hand, leading to vulnerabilities in the design remaining unnoticed. Security-aware EDA tools assist the designer in the identification and removal of security threats while keeping performance and area in mind. Cutting-edge methods employ information flow analysis to identify inadvertent information leaks in design structures. Current information leakage detection methods use quantitative information flow analysis to quantify the leaks. However, handling sequential circuits poses challenges for state-of-the-art techniques due to their time-agnostic nature, overlooking timing channels, and introducing false positives. To address this, we introduce QTFlow, a timing-sensitive framework for quantifying hardware information leakages during the design phase. Illustrating its effectiveness on open-source benchmarks, QTFlow autonomously identifies timing channels and diminishes all false positives arising from time-agnostic analysis when contrasted with current state-of-the-art techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_17819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QTFlow: Quantitative Timing-Sensitive Information Flow for Security-Aware Hardware Design on RTL
Reimann, Lennart M.
Prashar, Anshul
Ghinami, Chiara
Pelke, Rebecca
Sisejkovic, Dominik
Merchant, Farhad
Leupers, Rainer
Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
In contemporary Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, security often takes a backseat to the primary goals of power, performance, and area optimization. Commonly, the security analysis is conducted by hand, leading to vulnerabilities in the design remaining unnoticed. Security-aware EDA tools assist the designer in the identification and removal of security threats while keeping performance and area in mind. Cutting-edge methods employ information flow analysis to identify inadvertent information leaks in design structures. Current information leakage detection methods use quantitative information flow analysis to quantify the leaks. However, handling sequential circuits poses challenges for state-of-the-art techniques due to their time-agnostic nature, overlooking timing channels, and introducing false positives. To address this, we introduce QTFlow, a timing-sensitive framework for quantifying hardware information leakages during the design phase. Illustrating its effectiveness on open-source benchmarks, QTFlow autonomously identifies timing channels and diminishes all false positives arising from time-agnostic analysis when contrasted with current state-of-the-art techniques.
title QTFlow: Quantitative Timing-Sensitive Information Flow for Security-Aware Hardware Design on RTL
topic Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17819