PoliMakE: a policy making engine for secure embedded software execution on chip-multiprocessors

Secure software execution on chip-multiprocessor platforms is compromised by threats such as software-based side channel attacks that expose information from shared memory. The increasing amount of shared (memory or computational) resources on emerging chip-multiprocessors further exacerbates security threats, highlighting the need for secure policies to manage on-chip resources. We present PoliMakE, a methodology that enables exploration and generation of customized policies to guarantee secure software execution on a chip-multiprocessor system in the presence of software-based side channel attacks. PoliMakE analyzes an application's security needs and generates a series of custom policies that dictate how to safely execute tasks and efficiently manage the computational, communication, and memory resources. Our experimental results on DRM, JPEG as well as some synthetic applications show that PoliMakE enables secure software execution with minimal performance overhead, while reducing power consumption, since the policies are customized to efficiently utilize the available on-chip resources. For the case study of running DRM in secure mode concurrently with JPEG encoding, we are able to observe 61% performance improvement when compared to standard approaches. Our policy generation engine is able to generate policies in only a matter of minutes for secure applications with hundreds of tasks. Unsecure applications were observed to resume execution up to 99% faster than with the traditional halt approach.