Reconfigurable Hardware Security Modules for Enhancing Blockchain based Security Framework

Abstract

Globalization of the chip design and manufacturing industry has imposed newlinesignificant threats to the hardware security of Integrated circuits newline(ICs). It has made ICs more susceptible to various hardware attacks. newlineBlockchain provides a trustworthy and distributed platform to store newlineimmutable records related to the evidence of IP creation, authentication newlineof provenance and confidential data storage. However, blockchain newlineencounters major security challenges due to its decentralized nature of newlineledgers that contain sensitive data such as passwords/keys. The objective newlineof this research is to design dedicated programmable hardware newlinesecurity modules (HSMs) scheme to safeguard and maintain sensitive newlineinformation contained in blockchain network in the context of IC newlinesupply chain. Computationally intensive operations in blockchain are newlineperformed by the proposed model in place of General Purpose CPU s. newlineThis aids in significant reduction in power consumption at the same newlinetime elevates the performance of the whole system by manifold. newlineThis research work put forth a hardware based blockchain security newlinesolution by integrating the HSMs to secure and maintain sensitive data newlinewithin the blockchain network. FPGA based confidential processing newlinemodel provides a better distributed hardware solution where the end newlineuser has complete control over the hardware. Despite the addition of hardware units into the blockchain system results in increased area in comparison to the security feature this module offers to the entire framework, this overhead can be considered to be negligible. The major contribution of this work includes the following: newlineHash functions, Digital Signature and PUF structure is added as Hardware Security Modules (HSM) to implement blockchain inspired architecture in FPGA. Reconfigurability is added to every component in HSMs to impart flexibility and improve security of proposed FPGA design.Reconfigurable SHA-256 unit for any bit-size input suited for FPGA mining and to cryptographically secure the data inside blocks.