Related papers: One Exploit to Rule them All? On the Security of D…

This paper discusses the possible introduction of hidden reliability defects during CMOS foundry fabrication processes that may lead to accelerated wearout of the devices. These hidden defects or hardware Trojans can be created by deviation…

This essay investigates the role of cost in the development and production of secure integrated circuits. Initially, I make a small introduction on hardware attacks on smart cards and some of the reasons behind them. Subsequently, I…

The proliferation of consumer IoT products in our daily lives has raised the need for secure device authentication and access control. Unfortunately, these resource-constrained devices typically use token-based authentication, which is…

This work explores the use of machine learning techniques on an Internet-of-Things firmware dataset to detect malicious attempts to infect edge devices or subsequently corrupt an entire network. Firmware updates are uncommon in IoT devices;…

Supply chain security is extremely important for modern applications running at scale in the cloud. In fact, they involve a large number of heterogeneous microservices that also include third-party software. As a result, security…

Numerous security threats are emerging from untrusted players in the integrated circuit (IC) ecosystem. Among them, reverse engineering practices with the intent to counterfeit, overproduce, or modify an IC are worrying. In recent years,…

With increasingly sophisticated cyber-adversaries able to access a wider repertoire of mechanisms to implant malware such as ransomware, CPU/GPU keyloggers, and stealthy kernel rootkits, there is an urgent need for techniques to detect and…

Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems…

Advances in reverse engineering make it challenging to deploy any on-chip information in a way that is hidden from a determined attacker. A variety of techniques have been proposed for design obfuscation including look-alike cells in which…

The threat of hardware reverse engineering is a growing concern for a large number of applications. A main defense strategy against reverse engineering is hardware obfuscation. In this paper, we investigate physical obfuscation techniques,…

Boot firmware, like UEFI-compliant firmware, has been the target of numerous attacks, giving the attacker control over the entire system while being undetected. The measured boot mechanism of a computer platform ensures its integrity by…

A massive threat to the modern and complex IC production chain is the use of untrusted off-shore foundries which are able to infringe valuable hardware design IP or to inject hardware Trojans causing severe loss of safety and security.…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly…

Verifying integrity of software execution in low-end micro-controller units (MCUs) is a well-known open problem. The central challenge is how to securely detect software exploits with minimal overhead, since these MCUs are designed for low…

Intellectual Property (IP) infringement including piracy and over production have emerged as significant threats in the semiconductor supply chain. Key based obfuscation techniques (i.e., logic locking) are widely applied to secure legacy…

The implementation of cryptographic primitives in integrated circuits (ICs) continues to increase over the years due to the recent advancement of semiconductor manufacturing and reduction of cost per transistors. The hardware implementation…

Plagiarism detection in programming education faces growing challenges due to increasingly sophisticated obfuscation techniques, particularly automated refactoring-based attacks. While code plagiarism detection systems used in education…

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend…

PCBs are the core components for the devices ranging from the consumer electronics to military applications. Due to the accessibility of the PCBs, they are vulnerable to the attacks such as probing, eavesdropping, and reverse engineering.…

Chip designers outsource chip fabrication to external foundries, but at the risk of IP theft. Logic locking, a promising solution to mitigate this threat, adds extra logic gates (key gates) and inputs (key bits) to the chip so that it…