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EFFICIENT EMBEDDED SYSTEMS - SPEED, SECURITY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY

ALSOC is at a turning point with a shift to more software aspects of it research dealing with architecture. ALSOC’s unique experience in architecture will help to design new tools, algorithms and methods in order to capitalize on its expertise and move towards new challenges. This will be achieved through software release, publications conferences and journals, national and European funding as well as unfunded collaborations where research is very active and limitless.

Architectures : design of parallel architectures and their OS

  • Manycore architecture for the design and the evaluation of parallel algorithm : TSAR will be now used to deploy parallel algorithms and to evaluate middlewares.
  • Manycore OS design mixing the multi-kernel approach with direct inter-kernel accesses to improve performance (evolution of ALMOS-MK).
  • Virtual Prototyping and Design Space Exploration : propose a complete Design Space Exploration Tool based on Model Transformations between multiple levels of representation starting from SysML and arriving at cycle accurate bit accurate level.

Optimisations : methods, algorithms and tools

  • Deployment of real-time applications : we proved formally that the communications of a real-time application or any application specified using a Simulink formalism can be modeled using particular Synchronous-Data Flow graphs (SDFG). These specifications can be used to develop new original algorithme to optimize the execution of these applications on a many-core architecture, following as example the AUTOSAR standard.
  • Floating-point versus fixed-point coding : to develop tools and applications with the required amount of accuracy and to evaluate some trade-off (speed vs accuracy vs power consumption) applied to computer vision for smart cameras, robots and UAVs.
  • Design of efficient irregular parallel algorithms : focus on Connected Component Labeling and Analysis algorithm – an important class of algorithms in image processing, – that combines irregular graph processing (Union-Find building and update), discrete geometry and data-dependent (features) computations to find out how to transform, re-think and design irregular parallel algorithms, for multi/many cores processor with SIMD extension and GPUs

Code hardening and security : methods, algorithms and tools

  • The proposed formal verification approach and associated tool for the assessment of robustness of an application subject to fault attacks will be extended to enable an automatic analysis of sensitive parts of an application. We aim at extend the set of considered attacks (fault model and side-channel attacks), the type of security properties as well as the ability of our tool to deal with more complex codes. We aim at investigating the combination with other formal approaches in order to improve the scope of our framework from high-level security requirements to low-level robustness analysis.
  • Compilation flow for code hardening and robustness analysis of code subject to physical attacks. A security-oriented compilation flow will be set up in order to produce necessary and useful information for the robustness analysis. We also want to develop hardening pass and study the interaction between securing and optimization pass. This point is partially addressed in a collaborative project and a PhD thesis (ANR PROSECCO and CIFRE ISSM).
  • The secure execution of different operating systems on the same architecture requires a secure boot authentication mechanism in order to guarantee the code authenticity and form a chain of trust, from the start of the boot-loader to the kernel. This aspect has not been treated in the TSUNAMY project and may be subject to future work.