An Attempt for Trusted Communication in M³

Recent trends in hardware show an increase in specialization, decentralization and therefore heterogeneity of modern systems. M³, the system architecture emerging from Barkhausen Institut, acknowledges these trends by introducing a new hardware component called the TCU that, among other things, acts as a uniform communication interface to arbitrarily heterogeneous hardware. While M³ does a great job at abstracting away the underlying non-uniformity of its hardware, it makes idealized assumptions about communication channels, potential attack vectors as well as implicit trust relations between the diverse processing elements in the system. In this talk I want to outline my work on the M³ system architecture that I conducted as part of the Berufspraktikum (INF-D-930). More precisely, I will present my efforts to extend the existing communication protocols of M³ by including mechanisms for establishment of trust and encrypted communication channels. Furthermore, I will give an overview over on-going work that aims to revise the design of the TCU hardware component to be able to implement the adapted protocols.

(Internship report)