Black Hat USA 2025 | How to Secure Unique Ecosystem Shipping 1 Billion+ Cores?

Security research has historically been focused on securing well-known, widely replicated ecosystems—where problems and solutions are shared across the industry. But what happens when you build something no one else has? How do you secure an architecture that's both proprietary and deployed at billion-core scale? In 2016, NVIDIA began transitioning its internal Falcon microprocessor—used as a logic controller in nearly all GPU products—to a RISC-V-based architecture. Today, each chipset includes 10 to 40 RISC-V cores, and in 2024, NVIDIA surpassed 1 billion RISC-V cores shipped. This success came with unique security challenges—ones that existing models couldn't solve. To address them, we developed a custom software and hardware security architecture from scratch. This includes a purpose-built Separation Kernel software, novel RISC-V ISA extensions like Pointer Masking and IOPMP (later ratified), and unique secure boot and attestation mechanisms. But how do you future-proof a proprietary ecosystem against tomorrow's threats? In this talk, we'll share what we learned—and what's next. From hardware-assisted memory safety (HWASAN, MTE) to control-flow integrity (CFI) and CHERI-like models, we'll explore how NVIDIA is preparing not only its RISC-V ecosystem for the evolving threat landscape. If you care about real-world security at an unprecedented scale, this is a journey you won't want to miss. By: Adam Zabrocki | Director of Offensive Security, NVIDIA Marko Mitic | System Software Manager, NVIDIA Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/uCXUP7Z

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmAXnQJZbWg