Trust-minimized Integration of Third-Party Intellectual Property Cores

Our society relies on smart digital systems that fulfil not only performance and energy-efficiency demands, but also address security and privacy goals. At the same time, vendors must deal with stringent time-to-market challenges and tight budget constraints. This leads to the use and integration of intellectual property (IP) cores. Vulnerabilities in these cores may compromise the system's security. This paper presents a novel architecture concept that allows for a secure integration of IP cores with only minimal security assumptions. This is achieved by a hardware component called trusted communication unit (TCU) that isolates all components on the chip. A post-routing implementation shows only small security costs in terms of TCU area overhead of around 13%.