Extended abstract: A hardware-assisted data hiding based approach in building high performance secure execution systems

Recently, a novel data hiding technique was proposed to embed information into compiled binary codes in order to enhance system performance. Using this technique as a vehicle, we propose a framework to build high-performance secure execution systems by embedding data for security and trust purposes. We illustrate this approach in a mobile computing environment by an instruction-block level data hiding technique, which can be used to defend against malicious attacks (such as Trojan injection). This improves the trustworthiness of mobile codes. It also protects the code providerpsilas intellectual property because the code can be executed only on the designated device. When combined with the existing approach in [4], the proposed data hiding framework can provide trust and high-performance simultaneously. Finally, we conduct a proof-of-the-concept FPGA prototyping to validate the data hiding technique and evaluate the hardware cost in terms of gate count, power consumption, and gate delay.