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Adam Ilyas Caulfield

Publications and source records attributed to Adam Ilyas Caulfield.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Boosting Device Utilization in Control Flow Auditing

Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) are widely used in safety-critical systems, making them attractive targets for attacks. This calls for lightweight defenses that remain effective despite software compromise. Control Flow Auditing (CFAud) is one such mechanism wherein a remote verifier (Vrf) is guaranteed to received evidence about the control flow path taken on a prover (Prv) MCU, even when Prv software is compromised. Despite promising benefits, current CFAud architectures unfortunately require a ``busy-wait'' phase where a hardware-anchored root-of-trust (RoT) in Prv retains execution control to ensure delivery of control flow evidence to Vrf. This drastically reduces the CPU utilization on Prv. In this work, we addresses this limitation with an architecture for Contention Avoidance in Runtime Auditing with Minimized Execution Latency (CARAMEL). CARAMEL is a hardware-software RoT co-design that enables Prv applications to resume while control flow evidence is transmitted to Vrf. This significantly reduces contention due to transmission delays and improves CPU utilization without giving up on security. Key to CARAMEL is our design of a new RoT with a self-contained (and minimal) dedicated communication interface. CARAMEL's implementation and accompanying evaluation are made open-source. Our results show substantially improved CPU utilization at a modest hardware cost.

cs.CR

PAL*M: Property Attestation for Large Generative Models

Machine learning property attestations allow provers (e.g., model providers or owners) to attest properties of their models/datasets to verifiers (e.g., regulators, customers), enabling accountability towards regulations and policies. But, current approaches do not support generative models or large datasets. We present PAL*M, a property attestation framework for large generative models, illustrated using large language models. PAL*M defines properties across training and inference, leverages confidential virtual machines with security-aware GPUs for coverage of CPU-GPU operations, and proposes using incremental multiset hashing over memory-mapped datasets to efficiently track their integrity. We implement PAL*M on Intel TDX+NVIDIA H100 and evaluate it using state-of-the-art models and datasets, showing PAL*M is efficient, incurring < 11% overhead for common operations. Finally, we use the Tamarin Prover symbolic verification tool to formally model PAL*M's property attestation protocol, confirming that its security guarantees are upheld under the defined threat model.

cs.CR