Hardware Security

Hardware security and trust has emerged as an important frontier for next generation computing and communication, in an era where applications and embedded systems have become increasingly safety-critical by virtue of being in complete and total control of systems such as autonomous vehicles, critical infrastructure, embedded medical, and in more and more industrial and consumer internet-of-things (IoT) environments. Next generation security and trust primitives, such as physical unclonable functions (PUFs), promise to play a key role in hardening such systems against network and physical attacks, particularly those deployed in unsupervised, vulnerable environments. PUFs also possess great potential in providing a chain-of-trust and provenance throughout the design, fabrication and integration life cycle of integrated circuits (ICs) as they traverse through a globally disseminated manufacturing process. However, adversarial capabilities continue to evolve posing significant threats on information assurance, confidentiality and integrity through advanced side-channel physical attacks that are able to break through conventional algorithmic barriers. Sophisticated reverse engineering attacks threaten the privacy and ownership of intellectual property (IP). IC overbuilding and black market clones threaten the reputation and profit margins of reputable firms. Malicious hardware Trojan back doors and information leakage channels prove to be extremely evasive, adding uncertainty to the proper operational behavior of safety-critical and national defense-based microelectronic systems. Innovations in hardware-based security and trust primitives and techniques are emerging in lock-step to provide metering, obfuscation, tamper-evidence and other types of countermeasures against these types of evolving threats.

We invite authors to submit research papers on topics related to hardware-based authentication, encryption and secure boot protocols for resource-constrained embedded systems, on novel side-channel analysis attacks and countermeasures, on PUFs for ICs and printed circuit boards (PCBs) capable of providing security, trust and detection of tamper, on hardware Trojan attacks, analysis, detection methods and countermeasures, on supply-chain authentication and hardware assurance methods, on hardware-based security and trust primitives for RFID (Radio-frequency identification), IoT, autonomous vehicle, embedded medical, and industrial control, communication and other types of critical infrastructures, and on reverse engineering techniques and countermeasures to protect ICs and IPs through obfuscation and active metering schemes.

Prof. Dr. Jim Plusquellic
Section Editor-in-Chief