The Path to Fault- and Intrusion-Resilient Manycore Systems on a Chip

TL;DR

This paper discusses the evolving landscape of manycore SoC systems, highlighting their vulnerabilities to faults and cyberattacks, and explores how their inherent features can be leveraged to enhance resilience and security.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive perspective on using SoC features like replication and diversity to improve fault and intrusion resilience, calling for further research.

Findings

SoC features can be exploited for resilience

Techniques like replication and diversity enhance security

Open research avenues in hardware/software resilience

Abstract

The hardware computing landscape is changing. What used to be distributed systems can now be found on a chip with highly configurable, diverse, specialized and general purpose units. Such Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) are used to control today's cyber-physical systems, being the building blocks of critical infrastructures. They are deployed in harsh environments and are connected to the cyberspace, which makes them exposed to both accidental faults and targeted cyberattacks. This is in addition to the changing fault landscape that continued technology scaling, emerging devices and novel application scenarios will bring. In this paper, we discuss how the very features, distributed, parallelized, reconfigurable, heterogeneous, that cause many of the imminent and emerging security and resilience challenges, also open avenues for their cure though SoC replication, diversity, rejuvenation, adaptation, and hybridization. We show how to leverage these techniques at different levels across the entire SoC hardware/software stack, calling for more research on the topic.