Description: This doctoral dissertation discusses secure execution environments through reconfigurable lightweight cryptographic components. Software protection is one of the most important problems in the area of computing as it affects a multitude of players like software vendors, digital content providers, users, and government agencies. There are multiple dimensions to this broad problem of software protection. The most important ones are: 1) protecting software from reverse engineering. 2) protecting software from tamper (or modification). 3) preventing software piracy. 4) verification of integrity of the software. In this thesis the authors focus on these areas of software protection. The basic requirement to achieve these goals is to provide a secure execution environment, which ensures that the programs behave in the same way as it was designed, and the execution platforms respect certain types of wishes specified by the program. The authors take the approach of providing secure execution environment through architecture support. The authors exploit the power of reconfigurable components in achieving this. The first problem the authors consider is to provide architecture support for obfuscation. This also achieves the goals of tamper resistance, copy protection, and IP protection indirectly. The authors' approach is based on the intuition that the software is a ...