ITR: A Hardware/Compiler Co-Design Approach to Software Protection

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ITR: A Compiler-Hardware Co-Design Approach to Software ProtectionPI's: Rahul Simha, Bhagi Narahari, Alok Choudhary, Nasir MemonAbstract:The growing area of software protection aims to address the problems of code understanding and code tampering along with related problems such as authorization. This project will combine novel techniques in the areas of compilers, architecture, and software security to provide a new, efficient, and tunable approach to some problems in software protection. The goal is to address a broad array of research issues that will ultimately enable design tools such as compilers to assist system designers in managing the tradeoffs between security and performance.The main idea behind the proposed approach is to hide code sequences (keys) within instructions in executables that are then interpreted by supporting FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) hardware to provide both a "language" (the code sequences) and a "virtual machine within a machine" (the FPGA) that will allow designers considerable flexibility in providing software protection. Thus, by using long sequences and PKI to exchange a secret key with the FPGA while also encrypting the executable with that secret key, a system can be positioned at the high-security (but low-performance) end of the spectrum. Similarly, as will be explained in the proposal, by using shorter sequences and selective encryption, one can achieve high-performance with higher security than is possible with systems that rely only on obscurity.