Protection of heterogeneous architectures on FPGAs: An approach based on hardware firewalls

Pascal Cotret (1, 2) , Guy Gogniat (3) , Martha Johanna Sepulveda Florez (4)

1 SCEE - Signal, Communication et Electronique Embarquée
2 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique
3 Lab-STICC - Laboratoire des sciences et techniques de l'information, de la communication et de la connaissance
4 TUM - Technische Universität Munchen - Université Technique de Munich [Munich, Allemagne]

Embedded systems are parts of our daily life and used in many fields. They can be found in smart- phones or in modern cars including GPS, light/rain sensors and other electronic assistance mechanisms. These systems may handle sensitive data (such as credit card numbers, critical information about the host system and so on) which must be protected against external attacks as these data may be transmit- ted through a communication link where attackers can connect to extract sensitive information or inject malicious code within the system. This work presents an approach to protect communications in multi- processor architectures. This approach is based on hardware security enhancements acting as firewalls. These firewalls filter all data going through the system communication bus and an additional flexible cryptographic block aims to protect external memory from attacks. Benefits of our approach are demon- strated using a case study and some custom software applications implemented in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Firewalls implemented in the target architecture allow getting a low-latency security layer with flexible cryptographic features. To illustrate the benefit of such a solution, implementations are discussed for different MPSoCs implemented on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs. Results demonstrate a reduction up to 33% in terms of latency overhead compared to existing efforts

Domains: Hardware Architecture [cs.AR]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition [cs.CV]; Embedded Systems; Signal and Image Processing

Pascal Cotret, Guy Gogniat, Martha Johanna Sepulveda Florez. Protection of heterogeneous architectures on FPGAs: An approach based on hardware firewalls. Microprocessors and Microsystems: Embedded Hardware Design , 2016, 42, pp.127-141. ⟨10.1016/j.micpro.2016.01.013⟩. ⟨hal-01450746⟩