New technical paper titled “CellIFT: Leveraging Cells for Scalable and Precise Dynamic Information Flow Tracking in Hardware Designs” by researchers at ETH Zurich and Intel. Paper to be presented at USENIX Security 2022 (August 10-12, 2022) in Boston, MA, USA.
Partial Abstract
“We introduce CELLIFT, a new design point in the space of dynamic IFT [Information flow tracking] for hardware. CELLIFT leverages the logical macrocell abstraction (e.g., an adder) to achieve scalability, precision and completeness when instrumenting a given Register Transfer Level (RTL) hardware design. Cell-level dynamic IFT does not suffer from the scalability problems that are inherent to lower levels of abstraction such as gates, yet it achieves completeness given the limited number of cell types. We show the versatility of CELLIFT by instrumenting five distinct RISC-V designs, one of which is a complete SoC.”
Find the technical paper here.