The susceptibility of digital systems to tampering is of immense concern to military and commercial organizations. Current defenses against such techniques as reverse engineering and side channel analysis are limited and don't address the underlying vulnerable characteristics of digital circuits. In this paper, we propose a generalized defense methodology named Dynamic Polymorphic Reconfiguration that significantly reduces the probability of successful tampering. We achieve protection through

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... rgeted component hiding and the introduction of run-time autonomous defense adaptations. As a result, we establish the feasibility of self-protecting circuits.