1,157 research outputs found
Formal verification of a software countermeasure against instruction skip attacks
Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack
paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault
model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On
embedded processors, a fault model consisting in an assembly instruction skip
can be very useful for an attacker and has been obtained by using several fault
injection means. To avoid this threat, some countermeasure schemes which rely
on temporal redundancy have been proposed. Nevertheless, double fault injection
in a long enough time interval is practical and can bypass those countermeasure
schemes. Some fine-grained countermeasure schemes have also been proposed for
specific instructions. However, to the best of our knowledge, no approach that
enables to secure a generic assembly program in order to make it fault-tolerant
to instruction skip attacks has been formally proven yet. In this paper, we
provide a fault-tolerant replacement sequence for almost all the instructions
of the Thumb-2 instruction set and provide a formal verification for this fault
tolerance. This simple transformation enables to add a reasonably good security
level to an embedded program and makes practical fault injection attacks much
harder to achieve
A distributed programming environment for Ada
Despite considerable commercial exploitation of fault tolerance systems, significant and difficult research problems remain in such areas as fault detection and correction. A research project is described which constructs a distributed computing test bed for loosely coupled computers. The project is constructing a tool kit to support research into distributed control algorithms, including a distributed Ada compiler, distributed debugger, test harnesses, and environment monitors. The Ada compiler is being written in Ada and will implement distributed computing at the subsystem level. The design goal is to provide a variety of control mechanics for distributed programming while retaining total transparency at the code level
The Parallel Persistent Memory Model
We consider a parallel computational model that consists of processors,
each with a fast local ephemeral memory of limited size, and sharing a large
persistent memory. The model allows for each processor to fault with bounded
probability, and possibly restart. On faulting all processor state and local
ephemeral memory are lost, but the persistent memory remains. This model is
motivated by upcoming non-volatile memories that are as fast as existing random
access memory, are accessible at the granularity of cache lines, and have the
capability of surviving power outages. It is further motivated by the
observation that in large parallel systems, failure of processors and their
caches is not unusual.
Within the model we develop a framework for developing locality efficient
parallel algorithms that are resilient to failures. There are several
challenges, including the need to recover from failures, the desire to do this
in an asynchronous setting (i.e., not blocking other processors when one
fails), and the need for synchronization primitives that are robust to
failures. We describe approaches to solve these challenges based on breaking
computations into what we call capsules, which have certain properties, and
developing a work-stealing scheduler that functions properly within the context
of failures. The scheduler guarantees a time bound of in expectation, where and are the work and
depth of the computation (in the absence of failures), is the average
number of processors available during the computation, and is the
probability that a capsule fails. Within the model and using the proposed
methods, we develop efficient algorithms for parallel sorting and other
primitives.Comment: This paper is the full version of a paper at SPAA 2018 with the same
nam
Optimal Checkpointing for Secure Intermittently-Powered IoT Devices
Energy harvesting is a promising solution to power Internet of Things (IoT)
devices. Due to the intermittent nature of these energy sources, one cannot
guarantee forward progress of program execution. Prior work has advocated for
checkpointing the intermediate state to off-chip non-volatile memory (NVM).
Encrypting checkpoints addresses the security concern, but significantly
increases the checkpointing overheads. In this paper, we propose a new online
checkpointing policy that judiciously determines when to checkpoint so as to
minimize application time to completion while guaranteeing security. Compared
to state-of-the-art checkpointing schemes that do not account for the overheads
of encrypted checkpoints we improve execution time up to 1.4x.Comment: ICCAD 201
Quantum error correction in crossbar architectures
A central challenge for the scaling of quantum computing systems is the need
to control all qubits in the system without a large overhead. A solution for
this problem in classical computing comes in the form of so called crossbar
architectures. Recently we made a proposal for a large scale quantum
processor~[Li et al. arXiv:1711.03807 (2017)] to be implemented in silicon
quantum dots. This system features a crossbar control architecture which limits
parallel single qubit control, but allows the scheme to overcome control
scaling issues that form a major hurdle to large scale quantum computing
systems. In this work, we develop a language that makes it possible to easily
map quantum circuits to crossbar systems, taking into account their
architecture and control limitations. Using this language we show how to map
well known quantum error correction codes such as the planar surface and color
codes in this limited control setting with only a small overhead in time. We
analyze the logical error behavior of this surface code mapping for estimated
experimental parameters of the crossbar system and conclude that logical error
suppression to a level useful for real quantum computation is feasible.Comment: 29 + 9 pages, 13 figures, 9 tables, 8 algorithms and 3 big boxes.
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