SBIR-STTR Award

Tampering with or reverse engineering mission critical software is a very serious and real threat to modern weapons systems. Any protection which significantly degrades the performance of the weapons system is not practical. The proposed system will perform AT-related computations on a reconfigurable multicore processor to allow important security processes to execute without degrading the performance of the system. To achieve this goal, we will team with Rapport, Inc. to test the feasibility of using their Kilocore technology with our existing software AT product to protect real-time systems

In this Phase II research effort Arxan intends to build a practical and commercially feasible product - a reconfigurable-hardware-based protection-system integration product. That product EnforIT-H shall meet certain design goals. The first goal is to fill all unused FPGA space. The second goal is to insert protection into an application after development has been completed. For the third design goal of automatically supporting flexibility and re-configurability, we use the fact that our protections are instantiated on an FPGA. For the design goal supporting instance dependent protection we propose the construction of a general mechanism for binding protection behavior to a particular set of hardware device characteristics. For the design goal of strengthening the weaker links of a protection, we note that the EnforcIT product is based on the concept of building a network of mutually self-protecting protections using a variety of guards. Lastly, in the interest of broad applicability, we propose to build our guards in a manner which is agnostic to the hardware which interconnects the FPGA, the CPU running the software to be protected, and any other devices (e.g. RAM modules) required by the selected set of protections.

Keywords:
Reverse Engineering, Anti-Tamper (At), External Guards, Real-Time Software, Embedded Software,