Tutorial T9: Designing Secure SoCs

Summary form only given, as follows. The expanding reach and pervasiveness of personal and embedded computing are accompanied by proportional increases in concerns about information security. Embedded computing systems are being used in critical applications (medical electronics, automotive systems, and avionics, manufacturing control, smart grid), where the consequence of security attacks can be severe. Furthermore, several business models (e.g., e-commerce, distribution of multimedia content, etc.) require an adequate level of security in the associated electronic systems in order to be viable. On the other hand, the increasing complexity and networked nature of embedded systems have led to more vulnerabilities that can be more easily targeted for security attacks. If our past experience is any indication, conventional approaches to security or simple add-on security schemes are insufficient. Adequate security can be achieved in a system only if security is considered throughout the design process, including the design of the system-on-chips (SoCs) (hardware and embedded software). It is therefore imperative that SoC architects, HW designers, and embedded SW developers be aware of the security challenges and techniques to address them. This tutorial will introduce security challenges in embedded systems, identify the security requirements for SoCs that they contain, and present approaches to designing secure SoCs. Secure SoC design will be described as an attempt to bridge three "design gaps" - the assurance gap, performance gap, and battery gap. Examples from various state-of-the-art commercial SoCs will be used to illustrate the presented concepts. The tutorial is organized into five parts. Part 1 will focus on security concerns and challenges in secure SoC design. Part 2 will describe HW architectures for efficient security processing. Parts 3 and 4 will delve into the realm of SW and HW/side-channel attacks, and design countermeasures against them. Part 5 wil- talk about attacks on the design process (HW Trojans) and defenses against them.