Hashing hardware : identifying hardware during boot-time system verification

Modern systems measure the software loaded at boot-time to ensure the machine starts in a trusted state. Such measurements, however, do not include any information about the underlying hardware of the machine. Recent DRAM-based attacks and the growing complexity of the supply chain attest to the importance of measuring hardware at boot. In this thesis, we propose a technique for designing measurement schemes for hardware components. We then apply this technique to designing and implementing a hardware measurement scheme for DRAM on a real system without hardware modifications. Finally, we evaluate our DRAM hardware measurement scheme and demonstrate that it achieves 89% accuracy in mapping a DRAM measurement to the manufacturing process from which that DRAM was produced.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Chilingirian, Berj Krikor

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos and Martin Rinard.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112837

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112837