Designing secure systems on reconfigurable hardware
Ted Huffmire, Brett Brotherton, Nick Callegari, Jonathan Valamehr, Jeff White, Ryan Kastner, Timothy Sherwood · ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems · 2008
The extremely high cost of custom ASIC fabrication makes FPGAs an attractive alternative for deployment of custom hardware. Embedded systems based on reconfigurable hardware integrate many functions onto a single device. Since embedded designers often have no choice but to use soft IP cores obtained from third parties, the cores operate at different trust levels, resulting in mixed-trust designs. The goal of this project is to evaluate recently proposed security primitives for reconfigurable hardware by building a real embedded system with several cores on a single FPGA and implementing these primitives on the system. Overcoming the practical problems of integrating multiple cores together with security mechanisms will help us to develop realistic security-policy specifications that drive enforcement mechanisms on embedded systems.