Circuit Primitives for Monitoring Information Flow and Enabling Redundancy

Abstract

Critical systems require strict guarantees on information flow security and fault tolerance. We present a novel Boolean circuit methodology that can both monitor information flow throughout the hardware and simultaneously act as a triple modular redundant circuit. This is done by modifying the encoding technique for gate level information flow tracking (GLIFT). This new encoding not only has the added benefit of allowing for redundancy, it also reduces the size of the logic required for information flow tracking compared to the previous GLIFT encodings. This enables the development of high assurance systems on top of hardware with provable integrity and confidentiality properties. The new encoding also allows for these systems to be created with smaller area, lower power, and faster design time.