Architectural Diversity: Bio-Inspired Hardware Security for FPGAs

摘要

Security of computing systems has emerged as a major concern in today's society, as attacks on CPUs, ran-somware, and botnets are becoming all the more common. One of the primary enablers of these widespread attacks is the mass production of computer hardware. While this is beneficial for design, fabrication, and test, it leaves all devices with the same hardware vulnerable to the same attacks. In nature, diversity at the genetic level helps ensure survival of a species, and provides resilience to some individuals against certain pathogens. While diversity has been explored at the software level, its applicability to hardware is less obvious. This paper explores the application of mutating hardware, inspired by evolution in nature, to Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and provides examples of low-overhead modifications to a typical FPGA architecture that enables secure, mutating architectures for current- and next-generation FPGAs.