SHIELDSTRAP: Making secure processors truly secure

Abstract

Many systems may have security requirements such as protecting the privacy of data and code stored in the system, ensuring integrity of computations, or preventing the execution of unauthorized code. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure such protections as hardware-based attacks, in addition to software attacks, become more widespread and feasible. Many of these attacks target a system during booting before any employed security measures can take effect. In this paper, we propose SHIELDSTRAP, a security architecture capable of booting a system securely in the face of hardware and software attacks targeting the boot phase. SHIELDSTRAP bridges the gap between the vulnerable initialization of the system and the secure steady state execution environment provided by the secure processor. We present an analysis of the security of SHIELDSTRAP against several common boot time attacks. We also show that SHIELDSTRAP requires an on-chip area overhead of only 0.012% and incurs negligible boot time overhead of 0.37 seconds.