Visible to the public FPGA Accelerated Embedded System Security Through Hardware Isolation

TitleFPGA Accelerated Embedded System Security Through Hardware Isolation
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsKumar Saha, Sujan, Bobda, Christophe
Conference Name2020 Asian Hardware Oriented Security and Trust Symposium (AsianHOST)
Date Publisheddec
KeywordsAcceleration, composability, Domain Isolation, embedded system, Embedded systems, field programmable gate arrays, FPGA, Hardware, intellectual property security, policy-based governance, pubcrawl, Resiliency, security, SoC, Software, system-on-chip
AbstractModern embedded systems include on-chip FPGA along with processors to meet the high computation demand by providing flexibility to users to add custom hardware accelerators. Any confidential or sensitive information may be processed by those custom accelerators or hardware Intellectual Properties (IPs). Existing accelerator usage models in embedded systems do not prevent illegal access to the IPs, which can be a severe security breach. In this paper, we present a hardware-software co-design approach for secured FPGA accelerated embedded system design. Our proposed security framework inherits Mandatory Access Control (MAC) based authentication policies running at software down to hardware accelerators in FPGA. It ensures secured processing of confidential data in the hardware to prevent software originated attacks at hardware IPs and information leaks. We have implemented a prototype of our proposed framework, which shows that it can be easily integrated while designing an embedded system with custom accelerator IPs. The experimental results show that the proposed framework establishes secured hardware execution with a negligible amount of area and performance overhead.
DOI10.1109/AsianHOST51057.2020.9358258
Citation Keykumar_saha_fpga_2020