Process Isolation for Reconfigurable Hardware

One of the pillars of trust-worthy computing is process isolation, the ability to keep process data private from other processes running on the same device. While embedded operating systems provide isolation for the software part of these processes, there is no commonly accepted isolation mechanism for the hardware resources. As a result, systems may remain vulnerable to hardware-based attacks. This paper presents a secure coprocessor interface that extends the concept of process isolation into reconfigurable hardware. In the resulting coprocessor design, context information for different processes concurrently accessing the coprocessor is physically kept private. The coprocessor interface can handle context switches between different processes without assistance of the operating system. Because of this, reconfiguration of computation units can occur independent of the main processor. Moreover, it does so with greater efficiency than what is possible using software only.