A novel method for secure intellectual property deployment in embedded systems

The configuration data sequence of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an Intellectual Property (IP) of the original designer. With the increase in deployment of FPGAs in modern embedded systems, the IP protection of FPGA has become a necessary requirement for many IP vendors. There have been already many proposals to overcome this problem using symmetric encryption techniques but these methods need a cryptographic key to be stored in a non-volatile memory located on FPGA or in a battery-backed RAM as done in some of the current FPGAs. The expenses with the proposed methods are, occupation of larger area on FPGA in the former case and limited lifetime of the device in the latter. In contrast, we propose a novel method which combines the Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (Dynamic PR) feature of an SRAM-based FPGA with the Public Key Cryptography (PKC) to protect the FPGA configuration files without the need of fixed key storage on FPGA or external to FPGA. The proposed method, is secure against the known attacks such as the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack and replay attack. Therefore, the method can be used for secure deploying of IPs from local and remote vendors. Also, using this novel method not only high-end FPGAs but also low-end FPGAs with PR capabilities are secured.