Behind the Last Line of Defense -- Surviving SoC Faults and Intrusions

TL;DR

This paper introduces Midir, a distributed manycore architecture that enhances fault containment and security in SoCs by implementing quorum-based consensus and redundancy, significantly improving resilience against faults and intrusions.

Contribution

Midir presents a novel distributed architecture for manycore SoCs, integrating fault containment and secure consensus mechanisms to improve security and fault tolerance.

Findings

Outperforms MinBFT by one order of magnitude in microhypervisor resilience.

Enables versatile redundancy management for software resilience.

Provides hardware and algorithmic solutions for fault containment and security.

Abstract

Today, leveraging the enormous modular power, diversity and flexibility of manycore systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) requires careful orchestration of complex resources, a task left to low-level software, e.g. hypervisors. In current architectures, this software forms a single point of failure and worthwhile target for attacks: once compromised, adversaries gain access to all information and full control over the platform and the environment it controls. This paper proposes Midir, an enhanced manycore architecture, effecting a paradigm shift from SoCs to distributed SoCs. Midir changes the way platform resources are controlled, by retrofitting tile-based fault containment through well known mechanisms, while securing low-overhead quorum-based consensus on all critical operations, in particular privilege management and, thus, management of containment domains. Allowing versatile redundancy management, Midir promotes resilience for all software levels, including at low level. We explain this architecture, its associated algorithms and hardware mechanisms and show, for the example of a Byzantine fault tolerant microhypervisor, that it outperforms the highly efficient MinBFT by one order of magnitude.