| Security has been widely and deeply studied in the area of networking and general purpose processors. Many of these works have produced essential security algorithms or applications such as IPsec, SSL, cryptography algorithms, Firewall, etc. Recently, security is also becoming an important issue in the embedded system domain. This is due to that many of the current embedded devices are used to manipulate sensitive information such as bank account information. Further, there has been several security breaches reported in embedded system areas. For example, differential power analysis attacks have been shown to be able to reveal the secret key stored in smartcard chips [1,2,3,4], electromagnetic attacks on smartcards [5,6,7,8], software flaw exploitations, etc. Such vulnerabilities have increased significantly with the proliferation of embedded systems and with additional system functionalities, such as the wireless networking.; However, security in embedded system involves issues beyond the ones addressed for networking and general purpose processors. This is due to the limitation of resources possessed by the resource constrained embedded devices, such as memory space limitation, and battery limitation. Further, not only the software functionality of the security applications running in this system that should be proven secured but also their hardware implementations. This thesis addresses the security issues of embedded systems ranging from security attack preventions, low power design, and performance improvement schemes. This thesis focuses on the energy reduction of wireless communications, memory protections for embedded systems, software protections, and preventions from differential power analysis attacks. |
