Information flow isolation in I2C and USB

  • Authors:
  • Jason Oberg;Wei Hu;Ali Irturk;Mohit Tiwari;Timothy Sherwood;Ryan Kastner

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego;Polytechnical University, Xi'an China;Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego;Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara;Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara;Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Flight control, banking, medical, and other high assurance systems have a strict requirement on correct operation. Fundamental to this is the enforcement of non-interference where particular subsystems should not affect one another. In an effort to help guarantee this policy, recent work has emerged with tracking information flows at the hardware level. This article uses a specific method known as gate-level information flow tracking (GLIFT) to provide a methodology for testing information flows in two common bus protocols, I2C and USB. We show that the protocols do elicit unintended information flows and provide a solution based on time division multiple access (TDMA) that provably isolates devices on the bus from these flows. This paper also discusses the overheads in area and simulation time incurred by this TDMA based solution.