Open-Source Operating System Support for Information Security with FPGA Platforms

We propose to apply the open-source software development model to the domain of hardware/software codesign. Specifically, we propose to build around the GNU/Linux operating system a POSIX-thread compatible multi-threaded programming model for the reconfigurable CPU/FPGA hybrid platform. Under this programming model, hardware and software computation tasks will be able to communicate efficiently while executing in parallel. Also, the computations carried out by software and hardware are treated in a homogeneous way and thus interchangeable. Our target application domain is information security. Specifically, we will imple-ment two applications to demonstrate the effectiveness of this new framework. The first one is the acceleration of packet classification in wire-speed firewall. The second one is the implementation of a family of emergent multivariate public-key cryptosystems, called the Tame Transformation Signature (TTS). We hope the synergy between the two cho-sen applications and the proposed programming model will bring fruitful results to both hardware/software codesign and information security communities