Microarchitectural Support for Security and Reliability: an Embedded Systems Perspective

Security and reliability in microprocessor based systems are concerns requiring adroit solutions. Countermeasures by software-only approaches increase code size and therefore significantly reduce performance. Hardware assisted approaches use additional hardware monitors and thus incur considerably high hardware cost and have scalability problems. Considering security and reliability issues during the design of an embedded system has its advantages as this overcomes the limitations of existing solutions. This book is written for hardware design engineers and students with fundamental knowledge of VLSI logic design. The benefits of considering security and reliability issues during the design of an embedded system can be exploited by designers with expertise in the field of VLSI design, computer architecture and embedded systems. This book provides essential knowledge on these areas and focuses on the practical solutions for real-world problems. This book constitutes of the PhD thesis of the first author, which was performed at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney between 2003 and 2006.