Hardware Security and Trust: Trends, Challenges, and Design Tools

Abstract

Hardware security in the cyber security domain had become a more of a controversial topic over the past decade due to the introduction of new design technologies in semiconductors and expansion of global supplier chains. In proportion to the technological advancement of hardware production, the success rate of the existing hardware attacks had also evolved over the time with a significantly high rate of emergence of new attacking techniques and methods. Computing hardware is becoming a more and more attractive attack surface due to several reasons. The technology of analyzing the hardware components is becoming more and more affordable and accessible to the general public than before. Also due to the influx of IoT devices in the market, trend of simplifying the design structure to decrease the power consumption and maximizing the processing speed has become the theme of modern hardware implementations rather than the security of the devices. When considering the market demand and user requirements, it is more obvious for the computer manufacturers to give priority to user requirements rather than stressing more on the security aspects of their designs and devices. But there could be some catastrophic outcomes if the security aspects of these hardware tends to fail in a critical infrastructure, because these semiconductors are used in devices ranging from simple IoT devices to more complex systems like SCADA systems. Therefore, it is always a better approach to find a balance ground between the user requirement as well as the security of the hardware, without compromising either of both in the design and development. In this article, it presents an overall insight to trends in Hardware Security domain, specifically related to modern computer hardware design and manufacturing processes, distribution, usage, their disposal and recycling. These various stages are analyzed under Three main objectives of exposing the threats to computer hardware, suggesting countermeasures to minimize or eliminate those threats and discussing about the utilization of various design tools that can assist in the way to securing these computer hardware systems in their day-to-day applications.