STARSS

Autonomy, control and actuation opportunities offered by a colossal deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) open the door to a revolution in the way we live and interact with our environment. However, widespread adoption of IoT comes with the danger of its misuse for malicious purposes, threatening the loss of privacy, property, and life. The scope and reach of potential IoT security threat grows as fast as the number and reach of IoT devices. Hence, protecting the hardware of IoT cannot be left as an afterthought.

Vertically stacked three-dimensional (3D) integration of semiconductor chips is an emerging technology to ensure continued growth in transistor density and performance of integrated circuits (ICs). Despite the well-characterized advantages and limitations, the hardware security of such circuits has not received much attention. With shrinking number of trusted circuit manufacturers, trustworthiness of electronic devices is a growing concern. Vertical integration brings unexplored and unique challenges in managing hardware security.

Safeguarding sensitive user information stored in computer systems is a fast growing concern, especially as computers are universally used everywhere from national defense to mobile phones. Malicious hackers have found unscrupulous ways to steal sensitive information largely by exploiting the vulnerabilities in existing hardware and software. Among the many forms of information leakage, covert timing channels exfiltrate secrets from a trojan process with higher security credentials to a spy process with lesser credentials by exploiting the access timing of system resources.

The use of outsourcing in silicon manufacturing has rendered hardware susceptible to malicious bugs, called Trojans, that can cause an Integrated Circuit (IC) to fail in the field, similar to the way viruses manifest themselves in software. While there has been significant inroads into Trojan detection and diagnosis in the recent past, high-resolution Trojan detection has been hampered by the increased variability in silicon manufacturing processes, allowing Trojans to hide behind the design guardbands necessitated by process variability effects.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are hardware circuits that can be reconfigured by a system user after being deployed. FPGAs are a compelling alternative architecture that may allow hardware performance to continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Unfortunately, systems that incorporate an FPGA may allow a potentially untrusted user to reprogram hardware after it has been deployed. Such a scenario enables novel security attacks that can leak a user's private information or corrupt critical information stored on a system, but are performed entirely in hardware.