STARSS

To reduce production cost while meeting time-to-market constraints, semiconductor companies usually design hardware systems with reusable hardware modules, popularly known as Intellectual Property (IP) blocks. Growing reliance on these hardware IPs, often gathered from untrusted third-party vendors, severely affects the security and trustworthiness of the final system. The hardware IPs acquired from external sources may come with deliberate malicious implants, undocumented interfaces working as hidden backdoor, or other integrity issues.

There is a growing need for techniques to detect security vulnerabilities in hardware and at the hardware-software interface. Such vulnerabilities arise from the use of untrusted supply chains for processors and system-on-chip components and from the scope for malicious agents to subvert a system by exploiting hardware defects arising from design errors, incomplete specifications, or maliciously inserted blocks.

With the tremendous growth of sensitive and security-critical processing on embedded and pervasive platforms, the threat model for secure electronics is expanding from software into hardware. A wide range of fault attacks, based on physical manipulation of the electronics operating environment, is now available to the adversary.

The widely used encryption algorithms, based both on private- and public-key cryptography, provide provable security guarantees against attacks under an abstract model of computation. In reality, physical systems leak information and the adversarial access is not completely captured by the abstractions in the standard model. Attacks that exploit a physically observable signal, such as power, timing, or electromagnetic (EM) radiation, are known as side-channel attacks. They present a formidable challenge to ensuring the security of existing cryptographic applications.