Hardware Security and Trust: A New Battlefield of Information

Abstract

Hardware security and trust has received a lot of attention in the past 25 years. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the fundamental problems related to hardware security and trust to audiences who do not necessarily have hardware design background. In order to do that, we first discuss the evolving roles of hardware in security from an enable to an enhancer and now an enforcer as it get involves more and more in system security. Then we review the following key problems in hardware security, physical attacks, side channel analysis, intellectual property protection, hardware Trojan, hardware security primitives, and applications in security and trust. We provide a novel view of these problems and the corresponding solutions from the perspective of information battle between the attackers and designers, where we consider three types of information: data collected, processed, and stored by the hardware; information hidden in the design as watermark, fingerprint, and Trojans; and the chip fabrication variations that can be extracted and utilized. It is interesting to see how the hardware security and trust problems can be unified under this framework of information battle (stealing and protection). Unfortunately, there are more unknowns and challenges than what we have discovered on this framework as we illustrated in the section of open problems. However, the emerging Internet of Things and cyber physical systems have provided a large application field for researchers and practitioners to work on hardware based lightweight security.