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
- Xtal Oscillator on TSMC CLN7FF
- Wide Range Programmable Integer PLL on UMC L65LL
- Wide Range Programmable Integer PLL on UMC L130EHS
- Wide Range Programmable Integer PLL on TSMC CLN90G-GT-LP
- Wide Range Programmable Integer PLL on TSMC CLN80GC
Related Blogs
- Verifying Processor Security, Part 2
- Formally verifying protocols
- Arm receives first high assurance Common Criteria security certification for soft processor IP
- Commodity processor IP !?!