A Survey of Hardware Improvements to Secure Program Execution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hardware has been constantly augmented for security considerations since the advent of computers. There is also a common perception among computer users that hardware does a relatively better job on security assurance compared with software. Yet, the community has long lacked a comprehensive study to answer questions such as how hardware security support contributes to security, what kind of improvements have been introduced to improve such support and what its advantages/disadvantages are. By generalizing various security goals, we taxonomize hardware security features and their security properties that can aid in securing program execution, considered as three aspects, i.e., state correctness, runtime protection and input/output protection. Based on this taxonomy, the survey systematically examines (1) the roles: how hardware is applied to achieve security; and (2) the problems: how reported attacks have exploited certain defects in hardware. We see that hardware’s unique advantages and problems co-exist and it highly depends on the desired security purpose as to which type to use. Among the survey findings are also that code as part of hardware (aka. firmware) should be treated differently to ensure security by design; and how research proposals have driven the advancement of commodity hardware features.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".