Trustworthy Hardware [Scanning the Issue]

Since the 1990s, there has been a steady trend away from inhouse integrated circuit (IC) design and fabrication toward outsourcing various aspects of design, fabrication, testing, and packaging of ICs. The emergence of such a globalized, horizontal semiconductor business model created hitherto unknown security and trust concerns in the ICs and the information systems (rooted in these ICs), which modern society relies on for mission-critical functionality. IC and system security and trust concerns include threats related to the malicious insertion of Trojan circuits designed to act as silicon time bombs to disable an IC, intellectual property (IP) and IC piracy, untrustworthy third-party IPs, exfiltrating sensitive material from an IC, and malicious system disruption and diversion. Systems should be made trustworthy and secure hardware up. Security and trust should be considered as a first class metric during all stages in the IC and system design flows sideby-side power, cost, and performance. This special issue showcases advances in state-of-the-art trustworthy ICs and systems, and spans several aspects of IC and system security ranging from theoretical and conceptual foundations, synthesis, testing, and verification, through modeling and optimization, to case studies. From a trustworthy hardware platforms perspective this special issue covers IC and system security and trust issues in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), custom off the shelf (COTS), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), microprocessors, and embedded systems. It explains novel hardware security primitives such as physical unclonable functions (PUFs), public PUFs (PPUFs), and random number generators. It presents design for trust techniques such as IC watermarking, fingerprinting, obfuscation, and split manufacturing. It presents hardware-based security protocols for digital rights management (DRM), IC metering, enabling and disabling, and authentication. Finally, it presents a variety of hardware-based attacks. The first two papers survey novel hardware-based security primitives. Identification, authentication, and integrity checking are important tasks for ensuring the security and protection of devices, programs, and data. The use of microscopic, random, and unclonable disorder in physical media for such security tasks has recently gained attention. The first paper ‘‘Physical unclonable functions and applications: A tutorial’’ is a tutorial on ongoing work in physical-disorderbased security, security analysis, and implementation choices. The second paper entitled ‘‘Public physical unclonable functions’’ surveys the timebounded or public PUFs, including their design and security evaluation and the new protocols that they can support. The following three papers focus on embedded systems security. There is a steady rise of interconnected embedded systems as part of the emerging vision of pervasive computing. The PC-centric Internet is evolving into the Internet of Things. Securing such networked embedded devices is vital. A prominent attack on networked embedded systems is the Stuxnet virus on the nuclear reactor controllers. Another example is the attacks on implanted and wearable This special issue showcases advances in state-of-the-art trustworthy integrated circuits and systems spanning a range of topics from theoretical and conceptual foundations, synthesis, and testing to modeling and optimization, and case studies.