Reconfigurable Security Primitive for Embedded Systems

Embedded systems present significant security challenges due to their limited resources, power constraints and a variety of inherent vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable security primitive for secure embedded systems that leverages the capabilities of reconfigurable hardware to provide an efficient and flexible architectural support to both security standards and a range of attacks. This paper stresses design challenges for secure embedded systems and argues the case for reconfigurable architectural support for security. The reconfigurable security primitive is based on two main ideas: 1) an adaptable datapath, and 2) a hierarchy of controllers at the primitive and system level. The first controller manages the performance policy while the second one deals with the security policy. The AES cryptography algorithm has been considered to show the benefit of our approach compared to hardware and software solutions.