FIDES: Enhancing trust in reconfigurable based hardware systems

Abstract

Extensive use of third party IP cores (e.g., HDL, netlist) and open source tools in the FPGA application design and development process in conjunction with the inadequate bitstream protection measures have raised crucial security concerns in the past for reconfigurable hardware systems. Designing high fidelity and secure methodologies for FPGAs are still infancy and in particular, there are almost no concrete methods/techniques that can ensure trust in FPGA applications not entirely designed and/or developed in a trusted environment. This work strongly suggests the need for an anomaly detection capability within the FPGAs that can continuously monitor the behavior of the underlying FPGA IP cores and the communication activities of IP cores with other IP cores or peripherals for any abnormalities. To capture this need, we propose a technique called FIDelity Enhancing Security (FIDES) methodology for FPGAs that uses a combination of access control policies and behavior learning techniques for anomaly detection. We target FIDES architecture on a Xilinx Zynq 7020 device implemented with a red-black system comprising of sensitive and non-sensitive IP cores. Our results show that FIDES implementation leads to only 1–2% overhead in terms of the logic resources per wrapper and incurs minimal latency per wrapper for tag verification and embedding.