MeXT-SE: A Design Tool to Transparently Generate Secure MPSoC

Hardware accelerators are increasingly employed in conjunction with general-purpose processors to meet stringent performance constraints. In these heterogeneous systems, security has become a prime concern. In this article, we present a design approach to generate platform-independent secure multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoC) from a high-level abstraction. The aim of this article is to simplify the implementation of MPSoC, while ensuring security. The proposed design flow starts with a set of abstract and concrete specifications of a system, provided by the user, and ends up generating a generic description of the appropriate hardware design by setting up the communication structure of different components. The resulting abstract architecture is further processed using the vendor tool-chain to generate the target platform's configuration. To enforce security, we proposed a distributed isolation framework for multilevel security, resource assess control including access to and from hardware accelerators. From a user specification, the security layer is transparently generated and security rules and requirements transparently enforced at runtime. Experimentation results show that our proposed tool can generate MPSoC designs capable of providing secure hardware execution with negligible execution overhead.