Towards Single-Event Upset detection in Hardware Secure RISC-V processors

Abstract Single-event effects and hardware security show close similarities in terms of vulnerabilities and mitigation techniques. Secure processors address physical attacks from the outside, such as external laser stimulation, to compromise the program and extract sensitive information from the systems. To overcome this vulnerability, secure extensions to the hardware architecture are often built into modern processor cores. Given the limited design resources often found in space or high-energy physics experiment development teams, this article addresses the extent to which secure hardware architectures can be a reliable source of processor SEU detection.