Hardware-assisted secure communication for FPGA-based embedded systems

In recent years, embedded systems have evolved rapidly and become ubiquitous as they are found in a large number of devices. At the same time, as a result of recent technological advancements and high demand of connectivity, such systems are particularly susceptible to security attacks. Software-based security solutions cannot provide complete protection and are relatively slow. On the other hand, hardware-assisted techniques improve execution time but still involve dedicated software modules. In this paper, we have proposed a hardware based mechanism to process sensitive information in complete isolation without requiring any software process. The proposed solution is evaluated for an image processing based authentication system and it has demonstrated negligible area, power consumption and performance overhead.