Information Trust Institute University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ravishankar K. Iyer, Director

Vision

• Provide application-specific level of reliability and security, while delivering performance.
• Customized levels of trust enforced via an integrated approach involving:
  • configurable hardware
  • compiler methods to (1) extract security and reliability properties and (2) accelerate computation
  • configurable OS and middleware.
• Support enterprise computing with seamless extension across wireline-wireless domains.
• Scale from few nodes to large networked systems.

About Trusted ILLIAC

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A PDF of a slide presentation about Trusted ILLIAC presented by Wen-mei Hwu in June 2006 is available.

Security and reliability are the key attributes in building highly trusted systems. System security violations (e.g., an unauthorized privileged access or compromising of data integrity) can be caused by hardware errors (transient or intermittent), software bugs, resource exhaustions, environmental conditions, or any complex interaction among the above factors. To build a truly trustworthy system, the designer must consider mitigation (avoidance and tolerance) against accidental errors and malicious attacks.

The vision of Trusted ILLIAC is to create a large, demonstrably trusted cluster computing platform to support what is variously referred to as "on-demand/utility computing" or "adaptive enterprise computing." Such systems require a significant number of applications to co-exist and share hardware/software resources using a variety of constraint boundaries. The current solutions aim to provide HW and SW solutions that can only be referred to as a "one-size-fits-all" approach. Hence, trustworthy environments are complex to create, expensive to implement, and nearly impossible to validate.

The challenge is to provide an application-specific level of reliability and security in a totally transparent manner, while delivering optimal performance. The intellectual merit lies in a new set of application-aware methods to provide levels of trust that are customized (specified by the application) and enforced via an integrated approach that involves reprogrammable hardware (demonstrated via FRGA implementations), uses enhanced compiler methods to extract security and reliability properties, and is supported by a configurable OS and middleware.

A unique feature of the infrastructure is the massive use of reconfigurable hardware, which, supported by smart compilers , enables rapid design and deployment of low-cost application-aware hardware engines and a supporting OS and middleware configuration (to enable model-driven trust management and middleware oversight in protecting against security attacks) that provide an unparalleled opportunity to devise systems and applications with provable security and reliability guarantees. Tools and well-defined procedures will support configurability of system services exposed to end users, including error and intrusion detection, security vulnerability masking, and recovery.

A distinctive integral part of the Trusted ILLIAC is a validation framework , which constitutes a cornerstone for quantitative assessment of alternative designs and solutions. Such evaluation is crucial in making design decisions, which require understanding of trade-offs such as cost (in terms of complexity and overhead) versus efficiency of proposed mechanisms. The framework leverages years of experience we have in experimental evaluation of highly reliable and secure systems and is based on comprehensive fault and attack injection technology and tools developed at Illinois .

Finally, a collection of well-defined communication gateways (or APIs) facilitates robust low-overhead information flow between system layers in the trusted architecture while preserving the established reliability and security guarantees and relationships. The key objective is to enable seamless integration of a configurable hardware and software stack, including the operating system, the middleware, and the application.

In a broader context, Trusted ILLIAC provides low-cost configurable architecture that offers state-of-the-art, highly customizable computing technology to the broader community of students, researchers, and institutions to enable them to create their own integrated trusted computing test beds. The proposed infrastructure will benefit technology transfer efforts from research to real-world environments and will enable researchers to collaborate with developers from the government and industry to determine how trustworthy hardware assists and software stacks can be integrated into products.

Multiple sponsors contributed to the Trusted ILLIAC project, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO), AMD, Intel, HP, IBM, Xilinx, and Nallatech.

Using Trusted ILLIAC

University of Illinois users may now register to use Trusted ILLIAC for their projects.