Policy-Driven Memory Protection for Reconfigurable Hardware

Abstract. While processor based systems often enforce memory pro-tection to prevent the unintended sharing of data between processes, current systems built around reconfigurable hardware typically offer no such protection. Several reconfigurable cores are often integrated onto a single chip where they share external resources such as memory. While this enables small form factor and low cost designs, it opens up the op-portunity for modules to intercept or even interfere with the operation of one another. We investigate the design and synthesis of a memory protection mechanism capable of enforcing policies expressed as a formal language. Our approach includes a specialized compiler that translates a policy of legal sharing to reconfigurable logic blocks which can be di-rectly transferred to an FPGA. The efficiency of our access language design flow is evaluated in terms of area and cycle time across a variety of security scenarios

Policy-Driven Memory Protection for Reconfigurable Hardware [presentation]

Proceedings of the 11th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), Hamburg, Germany, September 2006, Pages 461-478. [Paper] [Conference] [Slides