  Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as
these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are
increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting
embedded systems illegally gain access to the information in these devices or
destroy information. The two most common types of attacks embedded systems
encounter are code-injection and power analysis attacks. In the past, a number
of countermeasures, both hardware- and software-based, were proposed
individually against these two types of attacks. However, no single system
exists to counter both of these two prominent attacks in a processor based
embedded system. Therefore, this paper, for the first time, proposes a
hardware/software based countermeasure against both code-injection attacks and
power analysis based side-channel attacks in a dual core embedded system. The
proposed processor, named SecureD, has an area overhead of just 3.80% and an
average runtime increase of 20.0% when compared to a standard dual processing
system. The overhead were measured using a set of industry standard application
benchmarks, with two encryption and five other programs.
