The purpose of this book is to provide a practical approach to managing security in
FPGA designs for researchers and practitioners in the electronic design automation
(EDA) and FPGA communities, including corporations, industrial and government
research labs, and academics. This book combines theoretical underpinnings with
a practical design approach and worked examples for combating real world threats.
To address the spectrum of lifecycle and operational threats against FPGA systems,
a holistic view of FPGA security is presented, from formal top level specification
to low level policy enforcement mechanisms, which integrates recent advances in
the fields of computer security theory, languages, compilers, and hardware. The
net effect is a diverse set of static and runtime techniques that, working in cooperation, facilitate the composition of robust, dependable, and trustworthy systems using
commodity components.
We wish to acknowledge the many people who helped us ensure the success of
our work on reconfigurable hardware security. In particular, we wish to thank Andrei
Paun and Jason Smith of Louisiana Tech University for providing us with a Linuxcompatible version of Grail+. We also wish to thank those who gave us comments
on drafts of this book, including Marco Platzner of the University of Paderborn, and
Ali Irturk and Jason Oberg of the University of California, San Diego. This research
was funded in part by National Science Foundation Grant CNS-0524771 and NSF
Career Grant CCF-0448654.
