Design And Implementation Of A Secure Co-processor Based On AES

With the rapid development of embedded products and the increased openness of theproduct design, the intellectual property right of embedded products has become the focusof product developers. Homogenization of the hardware solution makes more and moreproduct developers concentrate their core competencies in the embedded software;therefore, the method to protect the safety of embedded software is the key to theprotection of embedded products. The article first analyzes the characteristics ofembedded software, and sources of security threats, and then describes several commonembedded software protection programs and their advantages and disadvantages, on thesebases, an embedded software protection mechanism based on AES security coprocessor isproposed, moreover, the design of the security co-processor has been implemented.Embedded software protection mechanisms based on coprocessor effectively solvesthe problems that the pure software protection solution which occupies large systemresource, and other hardware protection schemes which require only a single identificationauthentication. With the use of heterogeneous S-box AES co-processor, the securitycoprocessor can verify the identity of the host and the user data and encrypt the proceduresand the built-in EEPROM memory can help users store their data and programs securely.As the resource of embedded systems is limited, a variety of structures and algorithms areused in the process of designing and implementation of security processor in order toachieve a positive balance among safety, size, speed and power consumption.Based on the system architecture, various functional modules were divided.According to the standard ASIC design procedure, the co-processor was designed with theVerilog hardware description language. Modelsim functional simulation was implementedand the FPGA platform to verify the hardware was build. The co-processor wassynthesized based on the HuaHong NEC0.35-micron technology library with the DesignCompiler, and its layout was designed with Astro. Ultimately, the coprocessor wassuccessfully tape out in HuaHong NEC, and hardware platform was built to test the chip,The results showed that the security co-processor met all the expectations.