Hardware\/software co-designed systems are increasingly prevalent due to trends such as the adoption of hardware accelerators and the availability of heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) architectures. A potential security concern arising from hardware\/software interaction in heterogeneous computing architectures is the possibility of software-based attacks on reconfigurable hardware, and vice versa. This is especially important when considering remote updates of the software, hardware, or both combined. In this work, we propose a remote update scheme that relies on a hardware root-of-trust and multiple updating parties to deliver hardware\/software updates in a secure fashion. The root-of-trust secures all cryptographic computations, as well as remote authentication, key storage, and update image integrity verification. By moving these operations down to a root-of-trust, the attack surface is limited such that, in the event of an attack from outside the root-of-trust (either from software or reconfigurable hardware), all security-critical computations and data remain inaccessible to the attacker. Furthermore, the proposed scheme aims to provide a high level of assurance that the system only accepts updates from approved entities while also preventing common remote attacks from compromising the security of the update process.<\/p>\n
K. Hutto, S. Paul, B. Newberg, V. Boyapati, Y. Vunnam, S. Grijalva, V. Mooney, “PUF-Based Two-Factor Authentication Protocol for Securing the Power Grid Against Insider Threat<\/a>,” Kansas Power and Energy Conference (KPEC’22), April 2022.<\/p>\n