Proof-Carrying Hardware: Runtime Formal Verification for Secure Dynamic Reconfiguration

Dynamically reconfigurable platforms are the means of choice for combining the performance of hardware and the flexibility of software. Such systems can adapt to any situation by downloading software and hardware functionalities as needed, which makes them widely applicable. As downtime is increasingly unacceptable and most deployment scenarios for embedded systems are safety and security critical, it is of outmost importance to provide for a secure reconfiguration, especially with regard to the content of new hardware modules. With my PhD project I propose Proof-carrying Hardware (PCH) as a novel approach to bring formal verification to hardware security for reconfigurable platforms. The Proof-carrying Hardware combines a hardware module and a formal proof of safety which adheres to a previously established safety policy. These are produced by an untrusted external source and delivered in a unsecured way. The proof can then comparatively easily be verified by the reconfigurable platform, i.e., with a fraction of the effort that was required for computing the proof. The consumer can trust the module without any previous guarantees about any step of the production or the transmission.