Hardware Intrinsic Security: Challenges, Solutions and Opportunities

The illusion that hardware is more dependable and trustable than the software running on it with deterring reverse engineering cost of highly miniaturized dense monolithic integrated circuit has once and again been invalidated. Remotely activated hardware Trojan and untraceable break-ins of networking systems running on fake and subverted chips have frequently been reported by businesses and military strategists, and confirmed by forensic security experts analysing these incidents. The situation was aggravated by the geographical dispersion of chip design activities and the heavy reliance on third-party hardware intellectual properties. Counterfeit chips (such as unauthorized copies, remarked/recycled dice, overproduced and subverted chips or cloned designs) pose a major threat to all stakeholders in the integrated circuit supply chain, from designers, manufacturers, system integrators to end users, in view of the severe consequence of potentially degraded quality, reliability and performance that they caused to the electronic equipment and critical infrastructure. This seminar addresses recent development in preventive countermeasures, postmanufacturing diagnosis techniques and emerging security-enhanced hardware primitives to avert these hardware security threats in the new age of Internet of Things (IoT) and emergent systems, where the intense interactions between devices and devices, and devices and humans have introduced new vulnerabilities of embedded devices.