Securing Software Intellectual Property on Commodity and Legacy Embedded Systems

The proliferation of embedded systems into nearly every aspect of modern infrastructure and society has seen their deployment in such diverse roles as monitoring the power grid and processing commercial payments. Software intellectual property (SWIP) is a critical component of these increasingly complex systems and represents a significant investment to its developers. However, deeply immersed in their environment, embedded systems are difficult to secure. As a result, developers want to ensure that their SWIP is protected from being reverse engineered or stolen by unauthorized parties. Many techniques have been proposed to address the issue of SWIP protection for embedded systems. These range from secure memory components to complete shifts in processor architectures. While powerful, these approaches often require the development of systems from the ground up or the application of specialized and often expensive hardware components. As a result they are poorly suited to address the security concerns of legacy embedded systems or systems based on commodity components. This work explores the protection of SWIP on heavily constrained, legacy and commodity embedded systems. We accomplish this by evaluating a generic embedded system to identify the security concerns in the context of SWIP protection. The evaluation is applied to determine the limitations of a software only approach on a real world legacy embedded system that lacks any specialized security hardware features. We improve upon this system by developing a prototype system using only commodity components. Finally we propose a Portable Embedded Software Intellectual Property Security (PESIPS) system that can easily be deployed as a framework on both legacy and commodity systems.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Gora, Michael Arthur

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Schaumont, Patrick R.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Tront, Joseph G.
• Marchany, Randolph C.

• Secure Embedded Systems
• Software
• Intellectual Property
• Firmware
• Security
• Field programmable gate arrays
• Design Flow
• Physical Unclonable Function

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-06072010-144645

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/33473