Designing Trusted Embedded Systems from Finite State Machines

Abstract

Sequential components are crucial for a real-time embedded system as they control the system based on the system's current state and real life input. In this article, we explore the security and trust issues of sequential system design from the perspective of a finite state machine (FSM), which is the most popular model used to describe sequential systems. Specifically, we find that the traditional FSM synthesis procedure will introduce security risks and cannot guarantee trustworthiness in the implemented circuits. Indeed, we show that not only do there exist simple and effective ways to attack a sequential system, it is also possible to insert a hardware Trojan Horse into the design without introducing any significant design overhead. We then formally define the notion of trust in FSM and propose a novel approach to designing trusted circuits from the FSM specification. We demonstrate both our findings on the security threats and the effectiveness of our proposed method on Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) sequential circuit benchmarks.