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Designing Trusted Embedded Systems from Finite State Machines

Published:06 October 2014Publication History
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Abstract

Sequential components are crucial for a real-time embedded system as they control the system based on the system's current state and real life input. In this article, we explore the security and trust issues of sequential system design from the perspective of a finite state machine (FSM), which is the most popular model used to describe sequential systems. Specifically, we find that the traditional FSM synthesis procedure will introduce security risks and cannot guarantee trustworthiness in the implemented circuits. Indeed, we show that not only do there exist simple and effective ways to attack a sequential system, it is also possible to insert a hardware Trojan Horse into the design without introducing any significant design overhead. We then formally define the notion of trust in FSM and propose a novel approach to designing trusted circuits from the FSM specification. We demonstrate both our findings on the security threats and the effectiveness of our proposed method on Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) sequential circuit benchmarks.

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  1. Designing Trusted Embedded Systems from Finite State Machines

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
        ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 13, Issue 5s
        Special Issue on Risk and Trust in Embedded Critical Systems, Special Issue on Real-Time, Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, Special Issue on Virtual Prototyping of Parallel and Embedded Systems (ViPES)
        November 2014
        501 pages
        ISSN:1539-9087
        EISSN:1558-3465
        DOI:10.1145/2660459
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2014 ACM

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 6 October 2014
        • Accepted: 1 June 2014
        • Revised: 1 March 2014
        • Received: 1 April 2013
        Published in tecs Volume 13, Issue 5s

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