Hardware mechanisms and their implementations for secure embedded systems

Abstract: Security issues appearing in one or another form become a requirement for an increasing number of embedded systems. Those systems, which will be used to capture, store, manipulate, and access data with a sensitive nature, have posed several unique and urgent challenges. The challenges to those embedded system require new approaches to security covering all aspects of embedded system design from architecture, implementation to the methodology. However, security is always treated by embedded system designer as the addition of features, such as specific cryptographic algorithm or other security protocol. This paper is intended to draw both the SW and HW designer attention to treat the security issues as a new mainstream during the design of embedded system. We intend to show why hardware option issues have been taken into consideration and how those hardware mechanisms and key features of processor architecture could be implemented in the hardware level (through modification of processor architecture, for example) to deal with various potential attacks unique to embedded systems.