15,348 research outputs found
Trojans in Early Design Steps—An Emerging Threat
Hardware Trojans inserted by malicious foundries
during integrated circuit manufacturing have received substantial
attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on a different
type of hardware Trojan threats: attacks in the early steps of
design process. We show that third-party intellectual property
cores and CAD tools constitute realistic attack surfaces and that
even system specification can be targeted by adversaries. We
discuss the devastating damage potential of such attacks, the
applicable countermeasures against them and their deficiencies
A Benes Based NoC Switching Architecture for Mixed Criticality Embedded Systems
Multi-core, Mixed Criticality Embedded (MCE) real-time systems require high
timing precision and predictability to guarantee there will be no interference
between tasks. These guarantees are necessary in application areas such as
avionics and automotive, where task interference or missed deadlines could be
catastrophic, and safety requirements are strict. In modern multi-core systems,
the interconnect becomes a potential point of uncertainty, introducing major
challenges in proving behaviour is always within specified constraints,
limiting the means of growing system performance to add more tasks, or provide
more computational resources to existing tasks.
We present MCENoC, a Network-on-Chip (NoC) switching architecture that
provides innovations to overcome this with predictable, formally verifiable
timing behaviour that is consistent across the whole NoC. We show how the
fundamental properties of Benes networks benefit MCE applications and meet our
architecture requirements. Using SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA), formal
properties are defined that aid the refinement of the specification of the
design as well as enabling the implementation to be exhaustively formally
verified. We demonstrate the performance of the design in terms of size,
throughput and predictability, and discuss the application level considerations
needed to exploit this architecture
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
A Design Methodology for Space-Time Adapter
This paper presents a solution to efficiently explore the design space of
communication adapters. In most digital signal processing (DSP) applications,
the overall architecture of the system is significantly affected by
communication architecture, so the designers need specifically optimized
adapters. By explicitly modeling these communications within an effective
graph-theoretic model and analysis framework, we automatically generate an
optimized architecture, named Space-Time AdapteR (STAR). Our design flow inputs
a C description of Input/Output data scheduling, and user requirements
(throughput, latency, parallelism...), and formalizes communication constraints
through a Resource Constraints Graph (RCG). The RCG properties enable an
efficient architecture space exploration in order to synthesize a STAR
component. The proposed approach has been tested to design an industrial data
mixing block example: an Ultra-Wideband interleaver.Comment: ISBN : 978-1-59593-606-
A Methodology for Efficient Space-Time Adapter Design Space Exploration: A Case Study of an Ultra Wide Band Interleaver
This paper presents a solution to efficiently explore the design space of
communication adapters. In most digital signal processing (DSP) applications,
the overall architecture of the system is significantly affected by
communication architecture, so the designers need specifically optimized
adapters. By explicitly modeling these communications within an effective
graph-theoretic model and analysis framework, we automatically generate an
optimized architecture, named Space-Time AdapteR (STAR). Our design flow inputs
a C description of Input/Output data scheduling, and user requirements
(throughput, latency, parallelism...), and formalizes communication constraints
through a Resource Constraints Graph (RCG). The RCG properties enable an
efficient architecture space exploration in order to synthesize a STAR
component. The proposed approach has been tested to design an industrial data
mixing block example: an Ultra-Wideband interleaver.Comment: ISBN:1-4244-0921-
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