An Investigation of Hardware Security Bug Characteristics in Open-Source Projects

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ah-kiow, Joey, Tan, Benjamin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ah-kiow, Joey
Tan, Benjamin
author_facet Ah-kiow, Joey
Tan, Benjamin
contents Hardware security is an important concern of system security as vulnerabilities can arise from design errors introduced throughout the development lifecycle. Recent works have proposed techniques to detect hardware security bugs, such as static analysis, fuzzing, and symbolic execution. However, the fundamental properties of hardware security bugs remain relatively unexplored. To gain a better understanding of hardware security bugs, we perform a deep dive into the popular OpenTitan project, including its bug reports and bug fixes. We manually classify the bugs as relevant to functionality or security and analyze characteristics, such as the impact and location of security bugs, and the size of their bug fixes. We also investigate relationships between security impact and bug management during development. Finally, we propose an abstract syntax tree-based analysis to identify the syntactic characteristics of bug fixes. Our results show that 53% of the bugs in OpenTitan have potential security implications and that 55% of all bug fixes modify only one file. Our findings underscore the importance of security-aware development practices and tools and motivate the development of techniques that leverage the highly localized nature of hardware bugs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Investigation of Hardware Security Bug Characteristics in Open-Source Projects
Ah-kiow, Joey
Tan, Benjamin
Cryptography and Security
Hardware security is an important concern of system security as vulnerabilities can arise from design errors introduced throughout the development lifecycle. Recent works have proposed techniques to detect hardware security bugs, such as static analysis, fuzzing, and symbolic execution. However, the fundamental properties of hardware security bugs remain relatively unexplored. To gain a better understanding of hardware security bugs, we perform a deep dive into the popular OpenTitan project, including its bug reports and bug fixes. We manually classify the bugs as relevant to functionality or security and analyze characteristics, such as the impact and location of security bugs, and the size of their bug fixes. We also investigate relationships between security impact and bug management during development. Finally, we propose an abstract syntax tree-based analysis to identify the syntactic characteristics of bug fixes. Our results show that 53% of the bugs in OpenTitan have potential security implications and that 55% of all bug fixes modify only one file. Our findings underscore the importance of security-aware development practices and tools and motivate the development of techniques that leverage the highly localized nature of hardware bugs.
title An Investigation of Hardware Security Bug Characteristics in Open-Source Projects
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00684