Cyber Resilience at the Edge Using Hardware Obfuscation

This project aims to strengthen the cybersecurity of edge computers used by special operation forces warfighters. Our team has developed a novel approach for edge computer security called CyberShield that implements hardware obfuscation to detect and defeat cyberattacks. By obscuring the edge computing hardware, an attacker can never write effective malware because they do not know the target instruction codes being used by the warfighter’s computer. Only trusted software compiled through the CyberShield obfuscation design flow will be able to be executed by the edge computer. The CyberShield hardware consists of functionally equivalent, redundant processing cores implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). By implementing CyberShield on an FPGA, the hardware obfuscation can occur at compile-time through alteration of the hardware description language (HDL) design of the final computer. The original software is compiled into a set of scrambled instruction codes and the HDL of each computing core is altered accordingly to understand the new codes. Once on the FPGA, a malware insertion attack will be immediately recognized by an instruction code voting system because the instruction codes are unrecognizable to the hardware cores. This allows the edge computer to detect the malware and then use a recovery procedure to remove the malicious code and restore proper operation. Since the detection and recovery occurs in hardware, the edge computer performance is minimally impacted, and it can operate-through-attack. This capability is crucial for edge computers used in mission scenarios where failure of warfighter computers is catastrophic. The CyberShield concept has been developed at Montana State University and has been licensed to Resilient Computing to seek commercialization opportunities in national security applications.