Security-Centric Hardware Architectures for Advanced Embedded Applications

Abstract

The increased use of embedded systems in safety-sensitive systems like autonomous cars, medical equipment, and industrial automation has increased in such a way that secure and power-efficient hardware-level security becomes more and more limited. The objective of the current study is to prepare and apply a security-oriented hardware system that will offer resilient protection to the physical and logical attacks and compatible with the limitations of the embedded systems. The suggested architecture is included Hardware Root of Trust (HRoT), a secure boot process, lightweight cryptographic co-processors, a runtime anomaly detection unit based on on-chip monitoring. They devised a prototype in a form of an FPGA-based environment (Xilinx Zynq-7020) validated using power, latency, and side-channel leakage measures. Most important findings rely on showing 10% or less side-channel leakage, 23 ms boot-time overhead, and 62 Mbps encryption bandwidth with very low power consumption (310 mW) increase. These results validate that the proposed architecture provides a scalable, secure and resource optimized anchor that can be used to enable nextgeneration embedded and edge computing systems especially in the automotive ECUs, industrial IoT controllers, and medical monitoring areas.