Formally Verifying Processor Security
November 20, 2019
Intel has had a couple of major events that totally changed their attitude to verification. The first was in 1994 when they had the Pentium floating-point divide bug and management said “don’t ever let this happen again”. In 1996, they started proving properties of the Pentium processor FPU.
Then, a couple of years ago, the side-channel vulnerabilities like Spectre were discovered. These didn't just affect Intel, it turned out every modern CPU had the same problem hiding in plain view for 20 years. Basically, the vulnerability plays on speculative execution making memory references and then being able to discover which memory elements were accessed, even though the speculative execution got abandoned.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Specialized Video Processing NPU IP for SR, NR, Demosaic, AI ISP, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation
- Ultra-Low-Power Temperature/Voltage Monitor
- Multi-channel Ultra Ethernet TSS Transform Engine
- Configurable CPU tailored precisely to your needs
- Ultra high-performance low-power ADC
Related Blogs
- Verifying Processor Security, Part 2
- Formally verifying protocols
- Formally verifying AVX2 rejection sampling for ML-KEM
- what made Apple design the A4 processor?
Latest Blogs
- Silicon Insurance: Why eFPGA is Cheaper Than a Respin
- One Bit Error is Not Like Another: Understanding Failure Mechanisms in NVM
- Introducing CoreCollective for the next era of open collaboration for the Arm software ecosystem
- Integrating eFPGA for Hybrid Signal Processing Architectures
- eUSB2V2: Trends and Innovations Shaping the Future of Embedded Connectivity