Design And Development of SoC in Medical

A Company name HEITEC developed a SoC based medical equipment. They develop a highly performing controller module that manages the actual devices of the application that control the diagnostic medical imaging and safety-critical processes, and that handles all necessary interfaces to the peripherals and a GUI PC. The challenge was to implement a lot of functionality in compressed space with great efficiency. For the design, an Intel (Altera) Arria 10 SoC (System-On-Chip) building block was selected, that combines a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with programmable FPGA logic.

In this article we will discuss about the security features they used in this equipment to secure the system on chip. For larger and more critical system components, it is important to protect designs from unauthorized copying, reverse engineering, and manipulation. Intel FPGAs take this into account by encrypting their configuration bitstreams with the Advanced POF Encryption Standard (AES), and defining or limiting accessible areas. Secure booting is supported based on Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Authentication (EC DSA) and a clear public key infrastructure. Only code from a known and reliable source is accepted.

The 20-nm FPGAs include additional security features that can be activated by using the standalone Qcrypt tool or Intel Quartus Prime Convert Programming File. Tamper Protection and JTAG security mode can be activated separately in 20-nm FPGAs, JTAG can be disabled or prevented from rereading. Safety with ECC into the cache ensures reliable error detection. Seven generally applicable timers and four watchdog timers are implemented. Various control mechanisms are able to prevent overheating or under-voltage.

This is the technology they used to secure SoCs in medical equipment.

Also a new technique of SoC security I would like to present here i.e. Central Security Breach Response Unit. As we see in the previous blog, secure-the-socs , 3 different techniques for securing the SoC. Now we will discuss this new technique.

Central Security Breach Response Unit

This hardware module can be viewed as the SoC’s central reporting unit for security-related events such as software intrusions, voltage tampering, and the like. This security related event information allows the Security Breach Response Unit to determine the next state of the SoC. The operations of this unit can be best explained by means of the following state machine.

The security breach response unit monitors the security intrusions. In case intrusions are reported by hardware detectors (like voltage, frequency, and temperature monitors), the response unit moves the state of the SoC to Non-Secure state. The Non-Secure state is characterized by certain restrictions that differentiate it from the Secure State. Any further security breach reported to the response unit will take the SoC to the Fail State, i.e., a non-functional state. The SoC remains in the Fail state until a power-on-reset is issued.

It should be noted here that the response to security intrusions is as per the software policy. For example, the software can configure certain intrusions to be non-fatal and hence those intrusions will not cause the SoC to move to Non-Secure or Fail State. This configurability is provided to cater to the different security requirements as per the SoC application.

The information of the SoC state is passed to other security aware sections in the SoC such as the Secure Memory Controller, which senses the state and protects the sensitive data.

So in this blog we discussed the security of SoC in medical equipment as well as a new technique to secure SoCs.

Stay Tuned, Stay safe and Stay Updated!!!