SecCheck: A Trustworthy System with Untrusted Components

Abstract

Mission critical applications face a security risk when they use third-party ICs for their speed and/or technology benefits. SecCheck is an architectural framework that securely incorporates fast, untrusted third-party cores (3PCs). It takes a comprehensive approach, providing for all of the different traditional fault tolerance techniques, to verify the 3PCs' functioning. The verification is done at run-time by slow, trusted, homegrown cores (HGCs). The overhead of providing security is reduced through intelligent scheduling exploiting task-level parallelism. The average performance penalty for achieving security under SecCheck is just 10-17% (optimal schedule), even when the HGCs are only half as fast as the 3PCs. We also devise a heuristic-based scheduler that is 500X faster than an ILP-based optimal one, with a relative penalty less than 1%.