Safety Verification of Third-Party Hardware Modules via Information Flow Tracking
Authors:
Andres Meza, Francesco Restuccia, Ryan Kastner and Jason Oberg
Keywords:
safety verification, on-chip communication, information flow tracking
Abstract:
"Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) employ heterogeneous architectures deploying various hardware IP cores and shared on-chip resources. Cores and resources typically communicate through a system interconnect based on a well-established communication protocol standard, such as the popular AMBA AXI standard. Previous works have demonstrated how the AXI definition allows for dangerous conditions to occur and subsequently delay system execution. Such conditions are compliant with the AXI standard and therefore may be difficult to capture in a standard verification flow. This makes them particularly critical for mission-critical applications, such as safety- and security-critical systems. This paper proposes a method to leverage Information Flow Tracking (IFT), a technique generally used in security verification, for identifying such dangerous behaviours -- our final goal is to verify and support the safety of bus interactions among hardware cores. Our methodology is integrated in a safety verification flow leveraging Tortuga Logic's simulation-based IFT tool, Radix-S."