[Cryptech Tech] fyi: Verifiable ASICs: trustworthy chips with untrusted components

[jeff.hodges at kingsmountain.com]

of possible interest, e.g., as a datapoint...

From: security-lunch <security-lunch-bounces at lists.stanford.edu> on behalf of
Henry Corrigan-Gibbs <henrycg at stanford.edu>
Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 1:02 PM
To: "security-lunch at lists.stanford.edu" <security-lunch at lists.stanford.edu>
Subject: [security-lunch] [SPAM:#] [SPAM:###] Riad Wahby on Verifiable ASICs

Riad will be speaking at Security Lunch tomorrow on his upcoming Oakland
paper about verifiable ASICs. Join us at the usual place and time for
free food and Riad's talk.

Henry


###

"Verifiable ASICs: trustworthy chips with untrusted components"
Speaker:  Riad Wahby

May 11, 2016 - 12:15pm
Gates 463A

Abstract:  A manufacturer of custom hardware (an ASIC) can undermine the
intended execution of that hardware. High-assurance execution thus
requires controlling the manufacturing chain. However, a trusted
platform might be orders of magnitude worse in performance or price than
an advanced, untrusted platform.

We explore an alternative: using verifiable computation (VC), an
untrusted ASIC computes proofs of correct execution, which are verified
by a trusted processor or ASIC. Notably, in the present setting, the
prover and verifier together must impose less overhead than the baseline
alternative of running the given computation directly on the trusted
platform. We respond to this challenge by designing and implementing
physically realizable, area-efficient, high throughput ASICs (for a
prover and verifier), in fully synthesizable Verilog. The system, called
Zebra, is based on the CMT interactive proof protocol; instantiating
Zebra required a blend of new observations about CMT, careful hardware
design, and attention to architectural challenges. We measure and
evaluate Zebra; for a class of real computations, it indeed poses less
overhead than executing directly on the trusted platform.

Joint work with:  Max Howald, Siddharth Garg, abhi shelat, Michael Walfish
_______________________________________________
security-lunch mailing list
security-lunch at lists.stanford.edu
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/security-lunch