Non-Performance Degrading Software Protection for Real-Time Processes

In this Phase II research effort Arxan intends to build a practical and commercially feasible product - a reconfigurable-hardware-based protection-system integration product. That product EnforIT-H shall meet certain design goals. The first goal is to fill all unused FPGA space. The second goal is to insert protection into an application after development has been completed. For the third design goal of automatically supporting flexibility and re-configurability, we use the fact that our protections are instantiated on an FPGA. For the design goal supporting instance dependent protection we propose the construction of a general mechanism for binding protection behavior to a particular set of hardware device characteristics. For the design goal of strengthening the weaker links of a protection, we note that the EnforcIT product is based on the concept of building a network of mutually self-protecting protections using a variety of guards. Lastly, in the interest of broad applicability, we propose to build our guards in a manner which is agnostic to the hardware which interconnects the FPGA, the CPU running the software to be protected, and any other devices (e.g. RAM modules) required by the selected set of protections.