Abstract: System virtualization techniques are broadly used to distribute computing power, to boot different operating systems virtually on top of a host OS, to enable security features like encapsulation or to provide redundancy and migration concepts. Virtual machines (VMs) targeting different Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) are usually implement by efficient emulation or binary translation techniques. This paper uses reconfigurable hardware to support (guest) operating system virtualization and not virtualization of hw-accelerators inside an operating system. The main idea of this paper is to replace emulation / binary translation by (re)configuration. Instead of emulating a processor-ISA on a CPU with another ISA, the required guest-processor will be configured into an FPGA and booted with a guest operating System (OS) as requested by a VM manager. This approach allows to overcome limitations of conventional system virtualization approaches, like the Popek and Goldberg theorem and provid

• Publication Date: 26-Sep-2016
• DOI: 10.15224/978-1-63248-104-7-01
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Abstract: In recent years, computer systems belonging to large companies, governments as well as personal computers have been experiencing an increasing wave of attacks that disrupt their normal operation or leak sensitive data. In this context, this paper presents a hardware-based approach which aims at detecting several types of attacks that degrade system security. The approach is based on a dedicated watchdog, which is tightly connected to the processor bus. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed technique can be applied to any application code “as it is”, i.e., it does not need application code recompilation. Additionally, the approach does not use of any kind of supervisor software (e.g., an Operating System - OS) to manage memory usage. To validate the approach, a case-study based on the LEON3 softcore processor and security-vulnerable code snippets from benchmark test codes have been implemented. Experimental results indicate that this approach is able to detect an intrusion tenta

• Publication Date: 26-Sep-2016
• DOI: 10.15224/978-1-63248-104-7-02
• Views: 0
• Downloads: 0