Verifiable Computer Security and Hardware: Issues

This report explores the influences of hardware on verifiable secure system design and envisions a mutually beneficial collaboration between the hardware verification and security communities. Hardware verification techniques offer the possibility of significantly enhanced assurance for secure systems at the lowest levels of system design and implementation. Security can provide an important and challenging applications arena in which hardware-oriented formal approaches can be tried and refined. We discuss some of the important concepts and issues that arise in trying to apply formal techniques to secure systems at the hardware level: the meaning of ‘‘security’’ in the context of hardware; the way to identify appropriate security properties at each level of system description, including the hardware level; and, a number of specific concerns related to hardware and its use in secure system development.