Adaptive and evolvable hardware security architectures

Abstract

Self reconfiguring hardware technology is enhancing its techniques and capabilities in modern FPGA technologies. As a result, evolving and self-adapting hardware architectures are becoming attractive in such environments. Self-generating secret hardware functions have been proposed recently [1]. The fact that such architectures are self-generated leads to the idea of keeping them evolving to achieve new dynamic security properties. This paper presents a hardware infrastructure concept which uses secret physical cipher units in evolvable operation mode. It is shown that such structures keep the cipher operational even if it is evolving in a dynamic fashion. Several new security application scenarios deploying the particular properties of secret physical ciphers are presented. The resulting scenarios exhibit some new properties in electronic environments including secured birth, secured aging and secured death as part of new robust electronic systems. Modern intelligent electronic systems are expected to require such properties in future complex systems. © 2010 IEEE.