13. Firmware Protection

Assurance of an embedded system’s security depends mainly on the protection scheme of the firmware. Enhancing the security of the hardware alone cannot protect the systems from various adversarial attacks, while keeping the firmware undefensive against tampering, cloning, or reverse engineering. For developing a counterfeit embedded application, the principal target is to retrieve the original firmware from the authentic hardware platform so that the adversary can maximize the profits while investing significantly less. However, remarkable researches have been done to protect the firmware. There are both software- and hardware-assisted approaches for firmware protection. The traditional software-based approaches cannot protect the control flow and sensitive information entirely from being leaked out. Furthermore, software-based approaches incur significant memory and performance overhead. This chapter focuses on some robust approaches for firmware protection that leverage the intrinsic hardware signatures to bind the firmware with the trusted hardware platform. In these schemes, the firmware does not run on counterfeit hardware systems or vice versa.