Diversification of Processors Based on Redundancy in Instruction Set

Shuichi ICHIKAWA  Takashi SAWADA  Hisashi HATA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E91-A   No.1   pp.211-220
Publication Date: 2008/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e91-a.1.211
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security)
Category: Implementation
Keyword: 
FPGA,  embedded systems,  instruction set,  randomization,  secure processor,  

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Summary: 
By diversifying processor architecture, computer software is expected to be more resistant to plagiarism, analysis, and attacks. This study presents a new method to diversify instruction set architecture (ISA) by utilizing the redundancy in the instruction set. Our method is particularly suited for embedded systems implemented with FPGA technology, and realizes a genuine instruction set randomization, which has not been provided by the preceding studies. The evaluation results on four typical ISAs indicate that our scheme can provide a far larger degree of freedom than the preceding studies. Diversified processors based on MIPS architecture were actually implemented and evaluated with Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA. The increase of logic scale was modest: 5.1% in Specialized design and 3.6% in RAM-mapped design. The performance overhead was also modest: 3.4% in Specialized design and 11.6% in RAM-mapped design. From these results, our scheme is regarded as a practical and promising way to secure FPGA-based embedded systems.