WHISK: An uncore architecture for Dynamic Information Flow Tracking in heterogeneous embedded SoCs

In this paper, we describe for the first time, how Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) can be implemented for heterogeneous designs that contain one or more on-chip accelerators attached to a network-on-chip. We observe that implementing DIFT for such systems requires holistic platform level view, i.e., designing individual components in the heterogeneous system to be capable of supporting DIFT is necessary but not sufficient to correctly implement full-system DIFT. Based on this observation we present a new system architecture for implementing DIFT, and also describe wrappers that provide DIFT functionality for third-party IP components. Results show that our implementation minimally impacts performance of programs that do not utilize DIFT, and the price of security is constant for modest amounts of tagging and then sub-linearly increases with the amount of tagging.