SoC security architecture: Current practices and emerging needs

At the era of everything is connected, security has become an essential key question when starting a new System-on-chip architecture. With the proliferation of secure systems, it is expected that many design teams will lack the essential knowledge and time to look at the abundant literature. In this paper, we intend to provide a reasonable approach to tackle this problem and try to convey the essential design rules, design elements and threats to any reader. We cover a possible methodology to collect requirements based on a systematic identification of the assets needing protection and threats against these assets: and make sure the design is appropriately sized and adequately secure. Once the requirements have been collected, the architecture can be laid out and we discuss the main elements that can compose it: trusted execution environment, secure boot, secure software update, secure design-for-test (DFT) components, Random Number Generation (RNG).