Secure management of the Intellectual Property in the Cloud

The development of distributed computing systems – and especially cloud computing – has raised new vulnerability challenges regarding intellectual property (IP) generated by moving client’s data to the cloud infrastructure. Sensitive data is thus located at a remote facility, where clients are not granted full control and administrative access, generating critical concerns about the security of their intellectual property. This paper proposes an approach based on securing the IP in the cloud using reconfigurable hardware architectures – FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based System-on-Chip (SoC): IP elements being integrated in the programmable logic as IP cores, benefiting from the security and management of on-chip integrated IP modules. Also, by transcending the cloud computing model from macro- to micro-structures, integrated IP cores gain a higher degree of adaptability and can be easily interconnected using Network-on-Chip architectures.