Adaptive Online Profiling Hardware for ICmetrics Based Security

Monitoring circuitry is presented that extracts properties and features from a complex system based on a System-on-Chip based device to support ICmetrics, a novel security concept that aims to uniquely identify and secure an embedded system based on its own behavioural identity. The circuits utilise a novel approach to profiling the instruction fetches and data accesses associated with each of the system’s component software tasks so that a representation of their address distributions can be generated online when required. By using profiling circuits with adaptive allocation of counters and by exploiting existing debugging infrastructure circuits, the overall resource requirement is kept sufficiently low for real-world applications. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the nature of features that can be obtained.