A framework for testing hardware-software security architectures

New security architectures are difficult to prototype and test at the design stage. Fine-grained monitoring of the interactions between hardware, the operating system and applications is required. We have designed and prototyped a testing framework, using virtualization, that can emulate the behavior of new hardware mechanisms in the virtual CPU and can perform a wide range of hardware and software attacks on the system under test. Our testing framework provides APIs for monitoring hardware and software events in the system under test, launching attacks, and observing their effects. We demonstrate its use by testing the security properties of the Secret Protection (SP) architecture using a suite of attacks. We show two important lessons learned from the testing of the SP architecture that affect the design and implementation of the architecture. Our framework enables extensive testing of hardware-software security architectures, in a realistic and flexible environment, with good performance provided by virtualization.