Co-design techniques for distributed real-time embedded systems with communication security constraints

In this paper we consider distributed real-time embedded systems in which confidentiality of the internal communication is critical. We present an approach to efficiently implement cryptographic algorithms by using hardware/software co-design techniques. The objective is to find the minimal hardware overhead and corresponding process mapping for encryption and decryption tasks of the system, so that the confidentiality requirements for the messages transmitted over the internal communication bus are fulfilled, and time constraints are satisfied. Towards this, we formulate the optimization problems using Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), which returns optimal solutions. However, CLP executions are computationally expensive and, hence, efficient heuristics are proposed as an alternative. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic approaches.