Time:
9:00 — 17:00, Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Location:
Ballroom Level — 506/507
Organizers:
- Sandhya Koteshwara, IBM Research, USA
- Mengmei Ye, IBM Research, USA
- Hubertus Franke, IBM Research, USA
Abstract:
With an ever-increasing number of attacks on the software, firmware and
hardware stacks of systems, there is an urgent need to adopt a zero-trust
model for cybersecurity. The zero-trust model is based on the principle of
“never trust, always verify” and is aimed at eliminating all implicit trust
in a system. While adopting a zero-trust model for network security
generally involves authenticating the credentials of users in the network,
authorizing access, and continuously validating the credentials, these
measures need to be modified and extended to create underlying hardware and
firmware that is trusted and secure. Cryptography to perform
authentication, verification and provide confidentiality are core
technologies to enable the foundations of zero trust. Addressing the
implementation challenges of cryptography is central to bringing zero-trust
principles to the cloud/edge computing environments. Thus, devising novel
approaches for building zero-trust architectures with efficient
cryptographic implementations, from systems all the way down to silicon, is
one of the big challenges for next generation hardware design.
Traditionally, research on establishing trust and security in hardware has
primarily focused on the host CPU and its associated memory subsystems.
These include principles of trusted execution environments, silicon roots
of trust, Trusted Platform Modules, encryption at rest, etc. In addition,
these techniques have primarily been focused on “boot time” verification.
For firmware in continuously running systems, there is also a need to
periodically reverify or continuously verify. Thus, in modern embedded and
non-embedded system architectures, such as edge/cloud computing, composable
systems, and chiplet based integrated circuits, trust needs to be extended
beyond the host to incorporate other hardware devices and the intellectual
property (IP) models used to design them. In view of threats such as
compromised supply chain integrity, counterfeit chips, hardware trojan
implants, malicious firmware, malware, etc., it is important to establish
trust in hardware components and to communicate trust between different
components of a system. This could include communication between different
IPs inside an SoC, between a host and its attached peripherals, as well as
between chiplets inside a multi-chip module. Trust also needs to be
established and revoked in a dynamic manner, with the ability to handle
large number of subcomponents in the design. Thus, a new set of protocols
that can work to establish trust and security in these new types of system
architectures has become necessary. While some of these protocols are being
developed as industry and government standards, large-scale effort is
required to bring them to adoption. It is equally important to develop open
source and verifiable hardware designs that can be secure while balancing
requirements for size, weight, power, performance, and functionality. The
focus of this workshop will be on all aspects of security and trust
required to create zero-trust hardware architectures for traditional and
embedded systems, and their components.
Topics of interest:
The areas of interest include but are not limited to:
- Extending confidential computing or Trusted Execution Environments
to embedded devices, components and peripherals
- Building security and trust through cryptography in novel computing
architectures such as composable processors/composable systems
- Enabling security and trust through cryptography in novel packaging
technologies such as Heterogeneous Integration/System-in-Package/Chiplets
- Secure and trusted integration of AI cores or AI chiplets in
heterogeneous systems/circuits
- Dynamic or runtime verification/reverification.
- Trusted computing and cryptographic implementation challenges of
real-time hardware for IoT and autonomous vehicles
- Supply chain security of hardware and firmware
- Threat models for applications of zero-trust architecture
- Hardware-Enabled security for Cloud and Edge computing
- Role of open-source designs and standards for security and trust
- Other emerging topics in security and trust such as post-quantum
cryptography, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation etc.
Further information is available here.
