Lecture Description:

IoT is everywhere. This trend did not stop at FPGA-based products and in recent years an increasing number of devices that leverage FPGA-implemented accelerators were connected to the Internet.
Handling Internet services is a typical software domain. Therefore, also the software stack of these devices is growing to a level that building everything in-house is not practical anymore. This leads to adding existing off-the-shelf software components to the product.
Unfortunately, connectivity and software don't come without the cost of increased complexity and security risks for the product. Adversaries might use bugs in the software to take over devices or networks and may cause harm to the business or even people.
While this is a common problem for embedded systems in general, FPGA-based products are at an increased risk. FPGA-based products often include custom software components that directly talk to the custom gateware. These software components are often not shielded with commonly used software security mechanisms or are hindrances for essential software updates. In this talk, we will discuss mechanisms to keep your product secure from a software perspective even with the introduction of Internet connectivity and while still leveraging the power of your custom FPGA-implemented IP.