Caisson: a hardware description language for secure information flow

Abstract

Information flow is an important security property that must be incorporated from the ground up, including at hardware design time, to provide a formal basis for a system's root of trust. We incorporate insights and techniques from designing information-flow secure programming languages to provide a new perspective on designing secure hardware. We describe a new hardware description language, Caisson, that combines domain-specific abstractions common to hardware design with insights from type-based techniques used in secure programming languages. The proper combination of these elements allows for an expressive, provably-secure HDL that operates at a familiar level of abstraction to the target audience of the language, hardware architects.