Formally Verifying Processor Security
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
- NFC wireless interface supporting ISO14443 A and B with EEPROM on SMIC 180nm
- DDR5 MRDIMM PHY and Controller
- RVA23, Multi-cluster, Hypervisor and Android
- HBM4E PHY and controller
- LZ4/Snappy Data Compressor
Related Blogs
- Verifying Processor Security, Part 2
- Formally verifying protocols
- what made Apple design the A4 processor?
- Android Outsells iPhones, Opens Processor Market
Latest Blogs
- lowRISC Tackles Post-Quantum Cryptography Challenges through Research Collaborations
- How to Solve the Size, Weight, Power and Cooling Challenge in Radar & Radio Frequency Modulation Classification
- Programmable Hardware Delivers 10,000X Improvement in Verification Speed over Software for Forward Error Correction
- The Integrated Design Challenge: Developing Chip, Software, and System in Unison
- Introducing Mi-V RV32 v4.0 Soft Processor: Enhanced RISC-V Power