System-level design for the assessment of shared resources effects on multiprocessor systems security
Farah Khazaal, Ulysse Couturier, Sébastien Le Nours, Maria Mendez Real · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023
ContextThe race for progress motivates all players in the electronics industry to alwayspush their limits in terms of optimization. Whether in terms of execution speed,energy consumption, or portability, design hours are allocated to these themes.However, the hardware security aspect struggles to impose itself. Despite beingan essential aspect, knowing that according to the ANSSI (French National Infor-mation Systems Security Agency), between 2019 and 2020, the number of victimsof cyber attacks has quadrupled.It is in this context that this three-month internship takes place, at the IETRlaboratory of Polytech Nantes (France). As a study support, it is the gem5 virtualprototyping software that has been used. The project’s aim is to study the possi-bilities given by gem5 software to analyze processor architecture’s vulnerabilities.This project focuses on exploring the capabilities of gem5 software for analyzingvulnerabilities in processor architectures. The main emphasis lies in understand-ing how the security of multiprocessor systems is influenced by the use of sharedresources.The work is based on the github sources provided by the gem5 community,and on the work of Pierre Ayoub and Clémentine Maurice: "Reproducing SpecterAttack with gem5: How To Do It Right?"