A closer look at security verification for RISC-V processors

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Verifying the security of processors has become an essential step in the design of modern electronic systems. Users want to be sure that their consumer devices can't be hacked, and that their personal and financial data is safe in the cloud. Effective security verification involves the processor hardware and the many layers of software running atop it.

www.edn.com/, Feb. 13, 2023 – 

This article discusses some of the challenges associated with hardware security verification and presents a formal-based methodology to provide a solution. Examples of designs implementing the popular RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) demonstrate the power of this approach.

Overview of security verification

Thorough and efficient verification of processors is one of the biggest challenges facing electronics developers. From the moment that processors moved from piles of standard parts to custom chips, functional verification became critical. The cost of re-fabrication to fix missed bugs was daunting, and the prospect of replacing defective devices in the field was terrifying. Sophisticated tools and methodologies were developed for pre-silicon functional verification, with focused teams complementing the chip designers.

As processor chips moved into safety-critical applications, the other shoe dropped: functional safety. Even chips that are 100% correct are at risk of misbehavior due to environmental conditions, alpha particle hits, and silicon aging effects. Lives can be lost if such a failure affects an implanted medical device, weapons system, nuclear power plant, or autonomous vehicle. A whole discipline of safety verification arose to ensure that faults would be detected, and proper responses could be taken, before safety was compromised.

Today, the third shoe is dropping–perhaps a three-legged stool is a better metaphor–with the importance of hardware security. In the context of this discussion, security means that a malicious agent cannot access an electronic system to harvest private data or take control of its operation. Every application that requires functional safety also demands security; clearly product designers must ensure that pacemakers, military devices, and self-driving cars cannot be taken over by someone intent on doing harm.

Many additional applications must also be secure so that secret data is not stolen or modified. The cyber-crime economy is estimated to be at least $1.5 trillion. Of course, banks and other financial institutions must be protected, but valuable personal data exists in countless thousands of systems spread around the world. Identity theft can be costly and personally devastating, even if only a few pieces of personal data can be harvested through a system vulnerability.

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