High Efficiency Protection Solution for Off-Chip Memory in Embedded Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a complete hardware solution for embedded systems that fully protects off-chip memory. Our security core is based on one-time pad (OTP) encryption and a CRC32 integrity check module. These modules safeguard external memories for embedded processors against a series of well-known attacks, including replay attacks, spoofing attacks and relocation attacks. The implementation limits memory space overhead to about 18.75% and reduces memory latency from 14 cycles for a alternate approach to 3 clock cycles. A FPGA-based implementation of the security core has been completed to gauge the security overhead and to compare our approach with existing solutions