Fletcher, Torrellas Included In Intel's New Resilient Architectures and Robust Electronics Multi-University Research Center

Intel Labs' University Research & Collaboration Office (URC) is pleased to announce the opening of a new multi-university research center called Resilient Architectures and Robust Electronics (RARE). The center will focus on assessing and improving the resiliency, reliability, and security of Intel® hardware and software, including the security of Intel® silicon integrated circuits. In addition, all research will be made public to the general semiconductor industry.

Academic researchers from 10 leading universities were selected to develop new capabilities to help increase the reliability and security of computing technologies. Research areas include systematic mitigation of error conditions and faults and associated impacts on future CPU architectures and implementations. These include faults caused by natural radiation, aging, random effects, noisy environments, and electronic glitches. In addition, research will also investigate intentionally caused faults such as fault injection attacks.

"Securing Intel technology and increasing the reliability of our semiconductors is our top priority," said Frank McKeen, senior principal engineer, Intel Labs. "Environmental anomalies and fault injection attacks, for example, are becoming more common, and there is a need to increase error detection and discover new ways to recover from errors. Through collaborating with these leading academic researchers, we will find solutions and novel approaches to these important industry-wide electronic security challenges."

The center launched in Q4 of 2021 and will operate for three years.

Details of Illinois CS professors Chris Fletcher and Josep Torrellas' specific area of research within RARE:

Scaling Processors to Hundreds of Security Domains
Christopher Fletcher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Josep Torrellas, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mohit Tiwari, University of Texas at Austin

Applications such as data-analytics pipelines, browsers, and service meshes operate on hundreds of concurrent security domains on each machine. Current approaches to isolating security domains rely primarily on strict partitioning of state and lose both performance and measurable guarantees in such over-committed environments. This project proposes many-domain architectures - from programming models down to micro-architecture - to securely multiplex hundreds of concurrent security domains in modern applications.

See the original article from Intel.