29 mars 2019 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
For the past decade, cybersecurity threats have moved from high in the software stack to progressively lower levels of the computational hierarchy, working their way towards the underlying hardware. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the creation of a rapidly growing number of accessible devices and a multitude of complex chip designs needed to enable them. With this rapid growth comes increased opportunity for economic and nation-state adversaries alike to shift their attention to chips that enable complex capabilities across commercial and defense applications. The consequences of a hardware cyberattack are significant as a compromise could potentially impact not millions, but billions of devices.
Despite growing recognition of the issue, there are no common tools, methods, or solutions for chip-level security currently in wide use. This is largely driven by the economic hurdles and technical trade-offs often associated with secure chip design. Incorporating security into chips is a manual, expensive, and cumbersome task that requires significant time and a level of expertise that is not readily available in most chip and system companies. The inclusion of security also often requires certain trade-offs with the typical design objectives, such as size, performance, and power dissipation. Further, modern chip design methods are unforgiving – once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible.
“Today, it can take six to nine months to design a modern chip, and twice as long if you want to make that same design secure,” said Serge Leef, a program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “While large merchant semiconductor companies are investing in in-house personnel to manually incorporate security into their high-volume silicon, mid-size chip companies, system houses, and start-ups with small design teams who create lower volume chips lack the resources and economic drivers to support the necessary investment in scalable security mechanisms, leaving a majority of today's chips largely unprotected.”
To ease the burden of developing secure chips, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore economics versus security trade-offs and maximize design productivity. The objective of the program is to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, IP licensers, and the open source community – that will allow security to be inexpensively incorporated into chip designs with minimal effort and expertise, ultimately making scalable on-chip security pervasive.
Leef continued, “The security, design, and economic objectives of a chip can vary based on its intended application. As an example, a chip design with extreme security requirements may have to accept certain tradeoffs. Achieving the required security level may cause the chip to become larger, consume more power, or deliver slower performance. Depending on the application, some or all of these tradeoffs may be acceptable, but with today's manual processes it's hard to determine where tradeoffs can be made.”
AISS seeks to create a novel, automated chip design flow that will allow the security mechanisms to scale consistently with the goals of the design. The design flow will provide a means of rapidly evaluating architectural alternatives that best address the required design and security metrics, as well as varying cost models to optimize the economics versus security tradeoff. The target AISS system – or system on chip (SoC) – will be automatically generated, integrated, and optimized to meet the objectives of the application and security intent. These systems will consist of two partitions – an application specific processor partition and a security partition implementing the on-chip security features. This approach is novel in that most systems today do not include a security partition due to its design complexity and cost of integration. By bringing greater automation to the chip design process, the burden of security inclusion can be profoundly decreased.
While the threat landscape is ever evolving and expansive, AISS seeks to address four specific attack surfaces that are most relevant to digital ASICs and SoCs. These include side channel attacks, reverse engineering attacks, supply chain attacks, and malicious hardware attacks. “Strategies for resisting threats vary widely in cost, complexity, and invasiveness. As such, AISS will help designers assess which defense mechanisms are most appropriate based on the potential attack surface and the likelihood of a compromise,” said Leef.
In addition to incorporating scalable defense mechanisms, AISS seeks to ensure that the IP blocks that make up the chip remain secure throughout the design process and are not compromised as they move through the ecosystem. As such, the program will also aim to move forward provenance and integrity validation techniques for preexisting design components by advancing current methods or inventing novel technical approaches. These techniques may include IP watermarking and threat detection to help validate the chip's integrity and IP provenance throughout its lifetime.
AISS is part of the second phase of DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) – a five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in the future of domestic, U.S. government, and defense electronics systems. Under ERI Phase II, DARPA is exploring the development of trusted electronics components, including the advancement of electronics that can enforce security and privacy protections. AISS will help address this mission through its efforts to enable scalable on-chip security.
DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on April 10, 2019 at the DARPA Conference Center, located at 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia 22203, to provide more information about AISS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details about the event, including registration requirements, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6770487d820ee13f33af67b0980a7d73&tab=core&_cview=0
Additional information will be available in the forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, which will be posted to www.fbo.gov.
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By: Seth J. Frantzman JERUSALEM — Israel Aerospace Industries on Monday announced more than $100 million in contracts for loitering munitions in three deals that include the Rotem VTOL and the Harop drones. The latter was sold in its land and naval versions. In keeping with the usual policy in Israel, the company did not reveal its customers, only saying that a foreign country acquired Rotem, while the naval and ground versions of Harop were sold in Asia. IAI said the contracts are proof of the importance that modern armies place in having accurate munitions, noting the deals may serve as a “harbinger of additional business activity.” Loitering munitions are sometimes referred to as kamikaze drones because they can be used as a weapon by crashing into a target. These weapons can also hunt down enemy air defenses, among other critical targets. The Harop maritime variant provides an operational solution for a range of vessels, IAI said. “In a complex naval theater, the Harop system gives mission commanders in a fleet of ships the capability to independently and organically collect intelligence, assess targets and strike,” the firm has said. It can also be used as an alternative to or complement sea-to-sea missiles, and is useful in both low- and high-intensity conflict as well as counterterror operations, according to the company. It is also equipped with day and night cameras. The Harop is sometimes seen in sets of nine on land vehicles but can be configured to a different format for use at sea. The electro-optical assets of the Harop aid the man-in-the-loop operator and also provide for deep strike air superiority capabilities, IAI said. The Rotem is a vertical-takeoff-and-landing drone used by several countries. “The system provides a reconnaissance, observation and attack envelope with maximum autonomous performance, integrating a simple and intuitive operation interface that can be used by a single fighter from a touchscreen tablet,” IAI said. According to Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, the recent Abraham Accords that saw relations improve between Israel and its neighbors, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, has opened a niche in which Israel is more “kosher” to do deals with. That opens doors in the Gulf region and to Muslim countries globally, where Israeli sales would otherwise be viewed skeptically or be very sensitive. Other events boosting sales, he noted, include tension with Iran and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, during which Azerbaijan used loitering munitions against Armenian forces. Israel often doesn't identify the countries to which it sells defense systems because it doesn't want to appear to be part of conflicts, Guzansky explained. But “usually in reports when they don't disclose, it can be an Arab or Muslim country or Singapore, so usual suspects could be Taiwan, Singapore, Philippines, etc.,” he added. “Israel must be sensitive, to think hard at what kind of weapon systems and to whom [it is selling],” Guzansky said, as the government doesn't want to become entangled in a conflict between rival countries or have its arms end up in the hands of those for which they were not intended. Tal Inbar, an expert on defense and missile systems and a former chief of the Space Research Center at the Fisher Institute, also pointed to the recent Armenian-Azeri conflict as showcasing the use of loitering munitions. Amid the Abraham Accords, “I believe we will see [a] dramatic increase in [sales of] Israeli products.” Three and a half decades of experience in producing UAVs has led IAI to this point. Its family of systems also include the Harpy, Mini Harpy and Green Dragon. The Harpy was developed with an anti-radiation seeker to suppress surface-to-air missile radar. IAI predicts a future where militaries will use multiple layers of unmanned and remotely operated systems. The company sees the systems as appropriate for a variety of customers, from wealthy nations seeking high-tech weapons to those customers that require an affordable option to compensate for a lack of fifth-generation warplanes. https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2021/02/02/israeli-firm-sells-harop-rotem-kamikaze-drones-to-several-asian-countries