Emerging Trends on Physical Security

Dear Colleagues,

Physical security in cryptographic systems is an emerging interdisciplinary and basic research area. In general, treating the physical “unclonability” of the system entities jointly with the cryptographic schemes involves complex issues due to its interdisciplinary nature. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs), as such technologies, have been introduced in the last two decades to fabricate physically unclonable units. Unclonable or non-replaceable physical units, in fact, represent a fundamental security anchor for attaining real resilient security systems. Emerging IoT (Internet of Things) and contemporary related work toward developing smart homes and smart cities—involving human beings, devices, structures, and virtually “everything”—represent a great interdisciplinary challenge facing the contemporary security research community. The continuous trend toward globalizing the networking of “virtually everything” opens new, very essential and relevant physical security requirements. System designers face globalized, unlimited,  borderless participating entities dealing with a variety of state regulations, forensic, political, and cultural issues. Publications treating physical security in the cryptographic environment are still far behind the intensively treated “soft” cryptographic techniques in the public literature. One ultimate goal in physical security is to approach the security level offered by biological systems, which still seems to be the most robust physical security ever known. Bio-inspired security can therefore be seen as a good reference model for targeted modern physical security systems. Biometrics have been so far successfully deployed in modern security systems. Mechatronic systems, and especially automotive systems, require “mechatronic security” techniques which are still far from being available for practical, real field applications.

This Special Issue on physical security is an attempt to stimulate more open scientific discussions in the research community addressing all related issues to this challenging topic.

Prof. Dr. Wael Adi
Guest Editor

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• physical cryptographic security theory
• physically unclonable functions (PUFs)
• unclonable or clone-resistant units/devices/entities
• unclonable or clone-resistant structures
• side-channel attacks on physical security systems
• physical security and related cryptographic schemes
• bio-inspired security
• provable physical uniqueness
• automotive physical security
• mechatronic security
• biometric security
• intellectual property protection