Accession Number:

ADA566363

Title:

Helix Project Testbed - Towards the Self-Regenerative Incorruptible Enterprise

Descriptive Note:

Final rept. 13-14 Sep 2011

Corporate Author:

CALIFORNIA UNIV SANTA BARBARA

Personal Author(s):

• Chong, Frederic

Report Date:

2011-09-14

Pagination or Media Count:

7.0

Abstract:

Information flow is an important security property that must be incorporated from the ground up, including at hardware design time, to provide a formal basis for a systems root of trust. We incorporate insights and techniques from designing information-flow secure programming languages to provide a new perspective on designing secure hardware. An important result of our DURIP is a new hardware description language, Caisson, that combines domain-specific abstractions common to hardware design with insights from type-based techniques used in secure programming languages. The proper combination of these elements allows for an expressive, provably-secure HDL that operates at a familiar level of abstraction to the target audience of the language, hardware architects. Additional work in this DURIP was to construct a minimal but configurable secure architectural skeleton. This skeleton couples a critical slice of the low level hardware implementation with a microkernel in a way that allows information flow properties of the entire construction to be statically verified all the way down to its gate-level implementation.

Descriptors:

• *CENTRAL PROCESSING UNITS
• *COMPUTER SECURITY
• POLICIES
• PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Subject Categories:

• Computer Hardware
• Computer Systems Management and Standards

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE