Integrating the Security Aspect into Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems

Conventionally, the process of design space exploration (DSE) in embedded system design considers performance, energy and cost as important objectives for optimization. However, in many domains such as in modern day cars the security aspect is becoming more and more significant. On the other hand, the inclusion of security aspect adds a new dimension to the existing complexity of large design spaces, thus an automated support for this is highly desired. The goal of this work is to integrate the security constraint in an automated DSE process to obtain an architecture which is both cost-optimized and secure. In specific, for a given system, our approach defines a formal notion of security, which along with other parameters is fed as an input to the DSE process to obtain an architecture satisfying the defined security and real-time requirements. An evaluation of the proposed approach is also performed using an example automotive embedded system.