Flexible software protection using hardware/software codesign techniques

A strong level of trust in the software running on an embedded processor is a prerequisite for its widespread deployment in any high-risk system. The expanding field of software protection attempts to address the key steps used by hackers in attacking a software system. In this paper we present an efficient and tunable approach to some problems in embedded software protection that utilizes a hardware/software codesign methodology. By coupling our protective compiler techniques with reconfigurable hardware support, we allow for a greater flexibility of placement on the security-performance spectrum than previously proposed mainly-hardware or software approaches. Results show that for most of our benchmarks, the average performance penalty of our approach is less than 20%, and that this number can be greatly improved upon with the proper utilization of compiler and architectural optimizations.