Information Security Seminar 

11/04/2008, 16:30 — 17:30 — Room P3.10, Mathematics Building
Ricardo Chaves, INESC-ID

Secure computing on reconfigurable systems

In this talk a Secure Computing Module (SCM) for reconfigurable computing systems will be presented. The SCM provides a protected and reliable computational environment, where data security and protection against malicious attacks to the system is assured. Secure Computing (SC) is strongly based on encryption algorithms and on the attestation of the executed functions. The use of SC on reconfigurable devices has the advantage of being highly adaptable to the application and the user requirements, while providing high performances. Moreover, it is adaptable to new algorithms, protocols, and threats. Experimental results obtained by implementing the proposed SCM on a reconfigurable device FPGA suggest speedups up to 750 times, compared with software implemented algorithms, achieving throughputs above 1Gbit/s at low area cost. A novel method to attest dynamically reconfigured hardware structures is also presented. The overall results demonstrate the applicability the advantages of implementing SC on reconfigurable systems.