225 research outputs found
Modern computing: Vision and challenges
Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
DIVAS: An LLM-based End-to-End Framework for SoC Security Analysis and Policy-based Protection
Securing critical assets in a bus-based System-On-Chip (SoC) is imperative to
mitigate potential vulnerabilities and prevent unauthorized access, ensuring
the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of the system. Ensuring
security throughout the SoC design process is a formidable task owing to the
inherent intricacies in SoC designs and the dispersion of assets across diverse
IPs. Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT (OpenAI) and BARD
(Google), have showcased remarkable proficiency across various domains,
including security vulnerability detection and prevention in SoC designs. In
this work, we propose DIVAS, a novel framework that leverages the knowledge
base of LLMs to identify security vulnerabilities from user-defined SoC
specifications, map them to the relevant Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs),
followed by the generation of equivalent assertions, and employ security
measures through enforcement of security policies. The proposed framework is
implemented using multiple ChatGPT and BARD models, and their performance was
analyzed while generating relevant CWEs from the SoC specifications provided.
The experimental results obtained from open-source SoC benchmarks demonstrate
the efficacy of our proposed framework.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 8 table
Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future
The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as
cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses,
organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an
individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main
challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called
cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as
cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with
these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and
develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and
environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of
cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future
directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of
cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security,
the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics.
We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based
on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main
specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of
research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable
artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly
increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining
machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and
has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.Comment: Author's copy of the book published under ISBN: 978-620-4-74421-
Towards trustworthy computing on untrustworthy hardware
Historically, hardware was thought to be inherently secure and trusted due to its
obscurity and the isolated nature of its design and manufacturing. In the last two
decades, however, hardware trust and security have emerged as pressing issues.
Modern day hardware is surrounded by threats manifested mainly in undesired
modifications by untrusted parties in its supply chain, unauthorized and pirated
selling, injected faults, and system and microarchitectural level attacks. These threats,
if realized, are expected to push hardware to abnormal and unexpected behaviour
causing real-life damage and significantly undermining our trust in the electronic and
computing systems we use in our daily lives and in safety critical applications. A
large number of detective and preventive countermeasures have been proposed in
literature. It is a fact, however, that our knowledge of potential consequences to
real-life threats to hardware trust is lacking given the limited number of real-life
reports and the plethora of ways in which hardware trust could be undermined. With
this in mind, run-time monitoring of hardware combined with active mitigation of
attacks, referred to as trustworthy computing on untrustworthy hardware, is proposed
as the last line of defence. This last line of defence allows us to face the issue of live
hardware mistrust rather than turning a blind eye to it or being helpless once it occurs.
This thesis proposes three different frameworks towards trustworthy computing
on untrustworthy hardware. The presented frameworks are adaptable to different
applications, independent of the design of the monitored elements, based on
autonomous security elements, and are computationally lightweight. The first
framework is concerned with explicit violations and breaches of trust at run-time,
with an untrustworthy on-chip communication interconnect presented as a potential
offender. The framework is based on the guiding principles of component guarding,
data tagging, and event verification. The second framework targets hardware elements
with inherently variable and unpredictable operational latency and proposes a
machine-learning based characterization of these latencies to infer undesired latency
extensions or denial of service attacks. The framework is implemented on a DDR3
DRAM after showing its vulnerability to obscured latency extension attacks. The
third framework studies the possibility of the deployment of untrustworthy hardware
elements in the analog front end, and the consequent integrity issues that might arise
at the analog-digital boundary of system on chips. The framework uses machine
learning methods and the unique temporal and arithmetic features of signals at this
boundary to monitor their integrity and assess their trust level
Towards Open Scan for the Open-source Hardware
The open-source hardware IP model has recently started gaining popularity in the developer community. This model offers the integrated circuit (IC) developers wider standardization, faster time-to-market and richer platform for research. In addition, open-source hardware conforms to the Kerckhoff’s principle of a publicly-known algorithm and thus helps to enhance security. However, when security comes into consideration, source transparency is only one part of the solution. A complex global IC supply chain stands between the source and the final product. Hence, even if the source is known, the finished product is not guaranteed to match it. In this article, we propose the Open Scan model, in which, in addition to the source code, the IC vendor contributes a library-independent information on scan insertion. With scan information available, the user or a certification lab can perform partial reverse engineering of the IC to verify conformance to the advertised source. Compliance lists of open-source programs, such as of the OpenTitan cryptographic IC, can be amended to include this requirement. The Open Scan model addresses accidental and dishonest deviations from the golden model and partially addresses malicious modifications, known as hardware Trojans. We verify the efficiency of the proposed method in simulation with the Trust-Hub Trojan benchmarks and with several open-source benchmarks, in which we randomly insert modifications
Towards a Peaceful Development of Cyberspace - Challenges and Technical Measures for the De-escalation of State-led Cyberconflicts and Arms Control of Cyberweapons
Cyberspace, already a few decades old, has become a matter of course for most of us, part of our everyday life. At the same time, this space and the global infrastructure behind it are essential for our civilizations, the economy and administration, and thus an essential expression and lifeline of a globalized world. However, these developments also create vulnerabilities and thus, cyberspace is increasingly developing into an intelligence and military operational area – for the defense and security of states but also as a component of offensive military planning, visible in the creation of military cyber-departments and the integration of cyberspace into states' security and defense strategies. In order to contain and regulate the conflict and escalation potential of technology used by military forces, over the last decades, a complex tool set of transparency, de-escalation and arms control measures has been developed and proof-tested. Unfortunately, many of these established measures do not work for cyberspace due to its specific technical characteristics. Even more, the concept of what constitutes a weapon – an essential requirement for regulation – starts to blur for this domain. Against this background, this thesis aims to answer how measures for the de-escalation of state-led conflicts in cyberspace and arms control of cyberweapons can be developed. In order to answer this question, the dissertation takes a specifically technical perspective on these problems and the underlying political challenges of state behavior and international humanitarian law in cyberspace to identify starting points for technical measures of transparency, arms control and verification. Based on this approach of adopting already existing technical measures from other fields of computer science, the thesis will provide proof of concepts approaches for some mentioned challenges like a classification system for cyberweapons that is based on technical measurable features, an approach for the mutual reduction of vulnerability stockpiles and an approach to plausibly assure the non-involvement in a cyberconflict as a measure for de-escalation. All these initial approaches and the questions of how and by which measures arms control and conflict reduction can work for cyberspace are still quite new and subject to not too many debates. Indeed, the approach of deliberately self-restricting the capabilities of technology in order to serve a bigger goal, like the reduction of its destructive usage, is yet not very common for the engineering thinking of computer science. Therefore, this dissertation also aims to provide some impulses regarding the responsibility and creative options of computer science with a view to the peaceful development and use of cyberspace
Security and Privacy for Modern Wireless Communication Systems
The aim of this reprint focuses on the latest protocol research, software/hardware development and implementation, and system architecture design in addressing emerging security and privacy issues for modern wireless communication networks. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: deep-learning-based security and privacy design; covert communications; information-theoretical foundations for advanced security and privacy techniques; lightweight cryptography for power constrained networks; physical layer key generation; prototypes and testbeds for security and privacy solutions; encryption and decryption algorithm for low-latency constrained networks; security protocols for modern wireless communication networks; network intrusion detection; physical layer design with security consideration; anonymity in data transmission; vulnerabilities in security and privacy in modern wireless communication networks; challenges of security and privacy in node–edge–cloud computation; security and privacy design for low-power wide-area IoT networks; security and privacy design for vehicle networks; security and privacy design for underwater communications networks
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