Evolvable Approaches to Software Verification and Validation

Research was conducted to integrate and advance current techniques in compilers, hardware architectures, and security to develop novel techniques to protect against physical attacks on encrypted embedded systems. The innovation in the approach was in exploiting the power of integrated software-hardware methods that do not require processor re-design. The hardware side of the innovation comes from using reconfigurable logic to implement security techniques in hardware. The reconfigurable logic in hardware, when combined with the ability of the compiler to instrument the code, can be used in powerful ways to strengthen the security of computing platforms. Several techniques were proposed and designed to address these objectives.