Security Primitives for Reconfigurable Hardware-Based Systems

Download
Author
Huffmire,Ted
Levin, Timothy
Nguyen, Thuy
Irvine, Cynthia
Botherton, Brett
Wang, Gang
Sherwood, Timothy
Kastner, Ryan
Date
2010-05-10Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Computing systems designed using reconfigurable hardware are increasingly composed using a number of different Intellectual Property (IP) cores, which are often provided by third-party vendors that may have different levels of trust. Unlike traditional software where hardware resources are mediated using an operating system, IP cores have fine-grain control over the underlying reconfigurable
hardware. To address this problem, the embedded systems community requires novel security primitives that address the realities of modern reconfigurable hardware. In this work, we propose security primitives using ideas centered around the notion of moats and drawbridges.
The primitives encompass four design properties: logical isolation, interconnect traceability, secure reconfigurable broadcast, and configuration scrubbing. Each of these is a fundamental operation with easily understood formal properties, yet they map cleanly and efficiently to a wide variety of reconfigurable devices. We carefully quantify the required overheads of the security techniques on modern FPGA architectures across a number of different applications.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Designing Secure Systems on Reconfigurable Hardware
Huffmire, Ted; Brotherton, Brett; Callegari, Nick; Valamehr, Jonathan; White, Jeff; Kastner, Ryan; Sherwood, Ted (Naval Postgraduate School (U.S)., 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. ... -
Moats and drawbridges: An isolation primitive for reconfigurable hardware based systems
Huffmire, Ted; Brotherton, Brett; Wang, Gang; Sherwood, Timothy; Kastner, Ryan; Levin, Timothy; Nguyen, Thuy D.; Irvine, Cynthia E. (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, (Oakland, CA), May 2007., 2007-05-01);Blurring the line between software and hardware, reconfigurable devices strike a balance between the raw high speed of custom silicon and the post-fabrication flexibility of general-purpose processors. While this flexibility ... -
Least privilege in separation kernels
Levin, Timothy E.; Irvine, Cynthia E.; Nguyen, Thuy D. (IEEE Design and Test of Computers, 2008-10-01);FPGAs combine the programmability of processors with the performance of custom hardware. As they As they become more common in critical embedded systems, new techniques are necessary to manage security in FPGA designs. ...