Secure Reconfigurable Computing

Three technologies must be advanced to enable the migration of reconfigurable computing from research to security and safety critical applications. Those technologies are rapid dynamic reconfiguration, multiple user support, and secure application separation. All three technologies are necessary to meet the requirements of future avionics, security, and defense applications. In this paper, we present a reconfigurable computing architecture that is explicitly secure for multiple user environments and supports varying degrees of criticality and privilege. At the core of our secure reconfigurable architecture is a real-time Multiple Virtual Machine (MVM) model in a direct execution JVM microprocessor [AW97,DAG98A]. Our architecture provides hardware-enforced guarantees of resource separation. We have extended this separation guarantee to support reconfigurable logic devices. Implementations of our architecture can be verified to be safe and secure [JMR98]. We outline our formal verification techniques, which are published and can be applied to modern safety-critical and security-critical development environments [DAG98B, SPM96]. We detail an approach for formally validating that our architecture enforces separation. An architecture should be developed with open system standards to exploit future technological advances. For that reason, we employ JavaTM as a cornerstone of our design. In our vision, the same Java classfiles can be used on a computer system with or without reconfigurable computing capabilities. We use the Java software method invocation interface to execute hardware algorithms on the reconfigurable computing elements. We present these concepts and preliminary results from our system simulations [SAS98].