Abstract
Distributed access control in modern heterogeneous architectures often leads to debugging complexities during software development. Security enforcement logic is typically embedded across multiple initiators and targets, creating a wide search space when failures occur. It is often difficult to distinguish between functional software bugs and access control misconfigurations, as both may result in similar system behavior or silent failures. A system and method are disclosed for the selective relaxation of access control policies through a hardware‑assisted debug controller. The debug controller may provide granular enable signals to individual subsystems. Each subsystem may include a control status register that, when qualified by a debug authentication signal, allows the local access control logic to be bypassed. This construction enables the systematic deactivation of security partitioning for specific peripherals or memory regions. One purpose of this system and method is to accelerate root cause analysis by isolating security related configuration errors from functional defects, and to pinpoint the specific access control component that is misconfigured. The use of selective bypass functionality may allow for targeted validation without compromising the security of unrelated system components.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Sinha, Rohit; Jha, Sumit; and Tutwani, Mayank, "Bypassing Distributed Access Control for Subsystem‑Level Debugging", Technical Disclosure Commons, (April 24, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/9923