Guest Editors’ Introduction: Trusted System-on-Chip with Untrusted Components

h SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC hardware at different stages of its life cycle has emerged as a paramount concern to integrated circuits (ICs) designers, system integrators, as well as to the end users. Over time, hardware components, platforms and supply chains have been considered secure and trustworthy. However, recent discoveries and reports on security vulnerabilities with attacks in microchips and circuits violate this hardware root of trust. System-on-Chip (SoC) design based on reusable hardware intellectual property (IP) is now a pervasive design practice in the industry due to the dramatic reduction in design/verification cost and time to market offers. This growing reliance on reusable pre-verified hardware IPs and a wide array of design automation tools during SoC designV often gathered from untrusted third party vendorsV severely affects the security and trustworthiness of SoC computing platforms. Major security issues at different stages of SoC life cycle include piracy during IP evaluation, reverse engineering, cloning, counterfeiting, as well as malicious hardware modifications, commonly referred to as hardware Trojan attacks. Furthermore, use of untrusted foundries in a fabless business model greatly aggravates the SoC security threats. Because of ever-growing computing demands, modern SoCs tend to include many heterogeneous processing cores (e.g., MPSoC), scalable communication network, and reconfigurable fabric (for instance, embedded FPGA), in order to incorporate logic that will likely change, as standards and requirements evolve. Such design practices greatly increase the number of untrusted components in an SoC design and make the overall system security a pressing concern. Clearly, there is a critical need to develop lowcost effective countermeasures that are based on the rigorous analysis of SoC security issues. It is important to consider various attack models that arise out of the involvement of multiple untrusted entities such as IP vendors, design tool developers, and foundries in the design cycle. These countermeasures should enable trusted operation with untrusted components at acceptable hardware overhead and design/validation cost. Towards that end, this special issue presents six articles that highlight challenges and approaches related to improving security and trustworthiness of SoC. The articles cover a wide range of security issues and innovative solutions related to IP-based SoC design, manufacturing, and test process. The first article titled ‘‘Practical, Lightweight Secure Inclusion of Third-Party Intellectual Property’’ by Waksman et al., proposes a secure, practical, and lightweight process for using thirdparty reusable intellectual property (IP). A decisionmaking algorithm called Algorithm for Resisting Trojans (ART) has been proposed that combines several existing techniques into one. The effectiveness