Configurable Computing for High-Security/High-Performance Ambient Systems

This paper stresses why configurable computing is a promising target to guarantee the hardware security of ambient systems. Many works have focused on configurable computing to demonstrate its efficiency but as far as we know none have addressed the security issue from system to circuit levels. This paper recalls main hardware attacks before focusing on issues to build secure systems on configurable computing. Two complementary views are presented to provide a guide for security and main issues to make them a reality are discussed. As the security at the system and architecture levels is enforced by agility significant aspects related to that point are presented and illustrated through the AES algorithm. The goal of this paper is to make designers aware of that configurable computing is not just hardware accelerators for security primitives as most studies have focused on but a real solution to provide high-security/high-performance for the whole system.