Adopting Decision Tree Based Policy Enforcement Mechanism to Protect Reconfigurable Devices

The Field Programmable Gate Array technology invaded the electronic market by offering economic advantages and many attractive features, such as the possibility to dynamically reprogram the hardware configuration in field. However, FPGA devices are not free of secure drawbacks, which include the possibility of install third-party components which may damage the system on which they are hosted. In this paper, we devise a policy enforcement mechanism to monitor and control the access of a dynamically installed component and we design it by employing Decision Trees. We demonstrate, with a significant experimental setup conducted on a commercial device, namely the Xilinx Zynq-7020, the efficacy of the DT based policy enforcer.