Enhancing Security of FPGA-Based Embedded Systems with Combinational Logic Binding

Abstract

With the increasing use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in embedded systems and many embedded applications, the failure to protect FPGA-based embedded systems from cloning attacks has brought serious losses to system developers. This paper proposes a novel combinational logic binding technique to specially protect FPGA-based embedded systems from cloning attacks and provides a pay-per-device licensing model for the FPGA market. Security analysis shows that the proposed binding scheme is robust against various types of malicious attacks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the low overhead of the proposed technique.