Our systematization of knowledge publication „In Hardware We Trust? From TPM to Enclave Computing on RISC-V“ which discusses RISC-V security architectures is published at the VLSI-SoC 2021 conference!
At Sanctuary, we have a close bond to security research and thus are always investigating the newest security trends on Arm, the x86 architecture and also on emerging computing platforms. One technology that gained a lot of momentum in recent years is the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) RISC-V. The open licensing model of RISC-V makes it especially interesting for the research community and start-ups to explore the design of completely new processors, whereby some of them already include advanced features such as out-of-order execution like the BOOM processor core. Moreover, even some big players of the semiconductor industry developed custom RISC-V processor cores. A list of all RISC-V processors taped out today can be found on the RISC-V Github.
On the security front, the RISC-V standard offers only some basic security mechanisms but the openness of RISC-V motivated security researchers around the globe to design and develop novel security architectures and mechanisms for the RISC-V platform across the full stack, both hardware and software. This brought rise to a number of novel enclave security architectures which attempt to address the shortcomings of existing industry solutions, and steer the future for upcoming industry solutions. Enclave architectures like our Zero-Trust Platform, which also uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), are a specific type of security architecture which offer execution contexts, called enclaves, that are strongly isolated from the rest of the software on a system, e.g., the operating system. Thus, enclaves are predestined to protect the most security-sensitive applications on a system. In this publication, we provide a brief overview of the most-known RISC-V based enclave architectures in academia, while highlighting their features, advantages and limitations.
You can download the full publication here.
by Patrick