A Tool and General Purpose Circuitry to Add Pre-Verified Secure Zeroization Capabilities to New and Existing FPGA Designs to Support Military Abandonment and Intellectual Property Protection

The U.S. Army has identified a need to enable FPGA designers to quickly and correctly add secure circuitry that provides zeroization functionality for military systems abandonment in theater to current and future platforms to ensure that the enemy cannot reverse engineer US military systems. To address these needs, Centennial Software Solutions LLC will develop and commercialize a product that includes a tool and general purpose circuitry to allow FPGA designers working with existing FPGA development tools to add pre-verified secure zeroization circuitry to new and existing designs. With our solution, designers will be able to specify media sanitization methodologies and zeroization triggers at a high-level and map their needs to specific platforms using the flows they already know. After a designer enters their zeroization goals, the tool will automatically map their goals to the designer’s platform using our product's general purpose zeroization circuitry and platform specific components that bridge the gap between high-level zeroization goals and a platform. This automatic mapping allows designers to more easily explore design space tradeoffs to support NIST 800-88 guidelines for media sanitization, build systems that meet FIPS 140-2 security requirements for cryptographic modules and other use cases. Our product’s general purpose circuitry and tool will help organizations reduce development costs and improve the quality and reliability of their zeroization implementations by using proven, pre-packaged solutions. In Phase I we will create general purpose zeroization circuitry and then create a tool that automatically maps the circuitry to evaluation systems from Intel (Altera) and Xilinx. We will also create the first release of the product in Phase I and a plan for a Phase II product release that supports specifying additional media platform sanitization goals, zeroization triggers and additional evaluation boards. During Phase I and as part of Phase II planning, we will also take feedback from customers to ensure future releases of our product continue to meet their needs.