An Ontology-Based Method for HW/SW Architecture Reconstruction

To address the vast variety of computing requirements in recent ubiquitous computing ecosystem, there is a constant need for more complex computing systems that consist of integrated hardware (HW) and software (SW) systems. Providing an architectural insight into such systems helps in achieving a more efficient usage of system resources, verifying the characteristics of a platform and provisioning of its security and trust. Architecture reconstruction (AR) has been used in software engineering to gain a deeper insight into specific software. Neither software AR nor hardware reverse engineering techniques are sufficient to extract the architecture of a system that incorporates both HW/SW, since they are unable to recover the relationships between the HW and SW components. Inspired by the Symphony software AR framework, we propose a method to reconstruct the architecture of a computing platform as a whole. In order to cover the wide variety of existing HW/SW technologies, our method uses an ontology-based approach. Due to the lack of a comprehensive ontology in literature, we developed PLATOnt, a new ontology that has been shown to be more effective by OntoQA evaluation framework. We used our AR method to reconstruct the architecture of an ARM-based trusted execution environment and a Raspberry Pi platform, widely used in embedded systems and IoT devices.