Holistic Hardware Security Assessment Framework: A Microarchitectural Perspective

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating hardware security from a microarchitectural perspective, categorizing threats and providing a generic metric to assess vulnerabilities at both component and system levels.

Contribution

It presents a novel holistic assessment framework that classifies threat models and offers a unified security metric for microarchitectural hardware evaluation.

Findings

Provides a systematic categorization of microarchitectural threat models

Introduces a generic security metric for hardware vulnerability assessment

Enables holistic evaluation of hardware security at multiple levels

Abstract

Our goal is to enable holistic hardware security evaluation from the microarchitectural point of view. To achieve this, we propose a framework that categorizes threat models based on the microarchitectural components being targeted, and provides a generic security metric that can be used to assess the vulnerability of components, as well as the system as a whole.