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Secure by construction: addressing security vulnerabilities introduced during high-level synthesis: invited

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Working towards a higher level of abstraction (C/C++) facilitates designers to execute and validate complex designs faster in response to highly demanding time-to-market requirements. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is an automatic process that translates the high-level description of the design behaviors into the corresponding hardware description language (HDL) modules. However, HLS translation steps/optimizations can cause security vulnerabilities since they have not been designed with security in mind. It is very important that HLS generates functionally correct RTL in a secure manner in the first place since it is not easy to read the automatically generated codes and trace them back to the source of vulnerabilities. Even if one manages to identify and fix the security vulnerabilities in one design, the core of the HLS engine remains vulnerable. Therefore, the same vulnerabilities will appear in all other HLS generated RTL codes. This paper shows a systematic approach for identifying the source of security vulnerabilities introduced during HLS and mitigating them.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Iterative Mitigation of Insecure Resource Sharing Produced by High-level Synthesis2023 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)10.1109/DFT59622.2023.10313550(1-6)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023

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  1. Secure by construction: addressing security vulnerabilities introduced during high-level synthesis: invited

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        DAC '22: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
        July 2022
        1462 pages
        ISBN:9781450391429
        DOI:10.1145/3489517
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 23 August 2022

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        Author Tags

        1. algorithms
        2. high-level synthesis
        3. information leakage
        4. optimization
        5. vulnerability

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        DAC '22: 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
        July 10 - 14, 2022
        California, San Francisco

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        • (2023)Iterative Mitigation of Insecure Resource Sharing Produced by High-level Synthesis2023 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)10.1109/DFT59622.2023.10313550(1-6)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023

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