Disposable configuration of remotely reconfigurable systems
Résumé
Reconfigurable architectures are being increasingly widely used thanks to their high flexibility. This flexibility
is due to their inherent ability to reconfigure (whether dynamically or not) functional blocks. Many
configurations can be used and changed while the application is running in the reconfigurable system,
and/or the same configuration can be used by several systems at different times. The flexibility of reconfigurable
systems is greatly enhanced if they can be reconfigured remotely. But in the case of remote
reconfiguration, security is of paramount importance. In this article, the problem of remote configuration
is addressed by the concept of disposable configuration, an efficient, secure and reliable mechanism for
maintaining the flexibility and security of the system. For the implementation of the secure reconfiguration
protocol, we propose to use the secure-by-design HCrypt cryptoprocessor, providing low cost, high
level protection against both hardware and software attacks without configuration throughput reduction.
We validated the approach on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA but it can be easily mapped to any other FPGA or
SoC.