Considering Software Protection for Embedded Systems

Given the current trend of reprogrammable embedded devices within the Department of Defense and industry, attention needs to be refocused on the benefits or measurability of software protection applied to this domain. Modern reconfigurable embedded systems consider circuits as software and the tamper methods applicable to physical circuits as new threats to a broadened definition of software.In the traditional sense, software referred to the bits (1s and 0s) representing language statements that could be executed on hardware processors. Today, embedded systems utilizing field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) realize circuits merely by downloading a sequence of bits that instantiate gates, controllers, arithmetic logic units, crypto circuits, and even processors. Thus, a circuit implemented on embedded systems utilizing an FPGA is essentially software.