Securing Hardware Accelerators: a New Challenge for High-Level Synthesis (Perspective Paper)

Home / Publications / Securing Hardware Accelerators: a New Challenge for High-Level Synthesis (Perspective Paper)

Christian Pilato, Siddharth Garg, Kaijie Wu, Ramesh Karri and Francesco Regazzoni

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools have made significant progress in the past few years, improving the design productivity for hardware accelerators and becoming mainstream in industry to create specialized System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. Increasing the level of security of these heterogeneous architectures is becoming critical. However, state-of-the-art security countermeasures are still applied only to the code executing on the processor cores or manually implemented into the generated components, leading to suboptimal and sometimes even insecure designs.