Hardware-assisted Software Anti-Tamper

Defense research and development is increasingly using software to perform critical roles. It is important that these assests be protected. Great progress has been made in providing in-band protection of software, including on-going work at GrammaTech. However, strong protection requires defensive measures at both the hardware and software levels. By adding additional reconfigurable hardware components to a system, a reverse engineer is confronted with additional devices to decipher, more hardware requirements for analysis, and the added complexity of additional inter-device communication to understand. We expect our Phase I effort to result in a prototype that will: (1) identify portions of a software executable that can be translated to an FPGA hardware environment; (2) perform sound binary-to-binary transformations to lift software algorithms out of a sensitive program and onto an FPGA.