Abstract
Embedded systems are subjecting to various kinds of security threats. Some malicious attacks exploit valid code gadgets to launch destructive actions or to reveal critical details. Some previous memory encryption strategies aiming at this issue suffer from unacceptable performance overhead and resource consumption. This paper proposes a hardware based confidentiality protection method to secure the code and data stored and transferred in embedded systems. This method takes advantage of the I/D-cache structure to reduce the frequency of the cryptographic encryption and decryption processing. We implement the AES engine with composite field arithmetic to reduce the cost of hardware implementation. The proposed architecture is implemented on EP2C70 FPGA chip with OpenRisc 1200 based SoC. The experiment results show that the AES engine is required to work only in the case of I/D-cache miss and the hardware implementation overhead can save 53.24% and 13.39% for the AES engine and SoC respectively.
Highlights
The rapid development of the Internet of Things technology brings the flourish of the embedded systems
This paper proposes a hardware based confidentiality protection method for embedded systems
All the data and program code stored off the SoC chip is encrypted using AES algorithm to secure the critical information
Summary
The rapid development of the Internet of Things technology brings the flourish of the embedded systems. While the embedded systems expose themselves to the external networks and devices, they become more vulnerable to the security attacks. We address this question by providing a hardware based confidentiality protection method to secure the code and data stored in the external memory off the processor chip. We use a hardware AES engine integrated between the system bus and processor to implement the memory encryption and decryption operation. This scheme works with the processor instruction and data cache, which provides performance enhancements by reducing the number of encryption and decryption operations.
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