Wei Shaojun's team published a paper on hardware security on Hot Chips

At Hot Chips 2019, a top high-performance chip conference held at Stanford University in the United States, Professor Wei Shaojun's team from Tsinghua University gave an academic report titled "Jintide: A Hardware Security Enhanced Server CPU with Xeon Cores under Runtime Surveillance by an In-Package Dynamically Reconfigurable Computing Processor".

It is reported that this paper is the only one on chip hardware security technology among the 26 conference reports of Hot Chips, and it is also the only first-author paper published by Chinese universities in the 31-year history of Hot Chips. The first author of the paper is Professor Liu Leibo, and the speaker is Senior Researcher Luo Ao.

The report introduces the Jintai server CPU chip jointly developed by Tsinghua University and Lanqi Co., Ltd., as well as the CPU hardware vulnerability protection solution developed in cooperation with Qihoo 360.

Jintai server CPU chip is the world's first CPU chip that uses third-party chips to implement runtime security monitoring of processor core hardware. Whether it is hardware Trojans, vulnerabilities, backdoors, or malicious use of front doors, they can be discovered in time and controlled on demand. The actual test results of the system show that when multiple Jintai server CPU chips are running at the same time, more than 99.8% of hardware attacks can be effectively detected, and the performance loss is only 0.98%.

In 2016, Wei Shaojun's team at Tsinghua University proposed a "CPU hardware security dynamic monitoring and control technology" based on a highly secure, highly flexible and reconfigurable chip architecture. This technology detects "illegal behavior" by dynamically and in real time monitoring the "legal behavior" during CPU operation, fundamentally overcoming the difficulty of monitoring and discovering traditional CPU security risks and technical vulnerabilities. Hardware Trojans, hardware vulnerabilities (such as "meltdown" and "spectre"), hardware backdoors, and malicious use of hardware front doors can all be quickly discovered by this technology and controlled as needed.

At present, this technology has entered commercialization. Xuanjia Microelectronics, which was established mainly by some core members of the team, has received full support from Tsinghua University and obtained the necessary technical authorization. Based on this technology and related chips, Shanghai Lanqi Co., Ltd. has designed and completed the Jintai server CPU chip, becoming the world's first server CPU chip with hardware security management capabilities. Lenovo, Great Wall Computer, PowerLeader, H3C and other server companies have completed the development of high-performance commercial servers based on Jintai server CPU chips, and some products have been put on the market.