Securing Soft IP Cores in FPGA based Reconfigurable Mobile Heterogeneous Systems
This addresses security concerns for system designers and actors in mobile markets using reconfigurable systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of securing intellectual property of soft IP cores in FPGA-based mobile heterogeneous systems by proposing two protocols for secure deployment, one for trusted entities and another using Direct Anonymous Attestation for untrusted scenarios, with a prototype implementation provided.
The mobile application market is rapidly growing and changing, offering always brand new software to install in increasingly powerful devices. Mobile devices become pervasive and more heterogeneous, embedding latest technologies such as multicore architectures, special-purpose circuits and reconfigurable logic. In a future mobile market scenario reconfigurable systems are employed to provide high-speed functionalities to assist execution of applications. However, new security concerns are introduced. In particular, protecting the Intellectual Property of the exchanged soft IP cores is a serious concern. The available techniques for preserving integrity, confidentiality and authenticity suffer from the limitation of heavily relying onto the system designer. In this paper we propose two different protocols suitable for the secure deployment of soft IP cores in FPGA-based mobile heterogeneous systems where multiple independent actors are involved: a simple scenario requiring trust relationship between entities, and a more complex scenario where no trust relationship exists through adoption of the Direct Anonymous Attestation protocol. Finally, we provide a prototype implementation of the proposed architectures.