Hardware Intrinsic Security for Trusted Electronic Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Hardware-intrinsic security takes advantage of the intrinsic behavior of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) to protect the hardware/software applications against new cyberattacks. Research in hardware intrinsic security and assurance (HISA) has recently gained momentum as it provides a unique layer of trust and authentication for emerging smart and life-critical applications. These applications include smart buildings and spaces, intelligent transportation and connected autonomous systems, advanced metering infrastructure to improve reliability, safety, sustainability, and power delivery in smart cities, implantable medical devices that diagnose, monitor, and treat a wide range of medical conditions to improve our lifestyles, smart sensors and embedded hardware for connected IoT devices. The recently exposed chip vulnerabilities, i.e. Spectre and Meltdown, are striking evidence that hardware intrinsic security is essential to enable trust in the manufactured hardware and chip design. For that, semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and embedded devices are designed, fabricated, and assembled at varies locations across the globe, involving multiple parties, making them venerable to new cyber and physical system attacks. The rapid devolvement of such critical security challenges in the modern supply chain security challenge urges the need for a non-conventional and robust countermeasure against such modern cyberattacks.

This special issue of MDPI: Electronics focused on hardware intrinsic security and its applications for electronics systems, particularly in constructing imminent computing systems against these emerging attacks without significantly degrading system performance. This includes new hardware security issues that have grown significantly over the past decade with an array of new physical and embedded systems attacks and countermeasures like malicious modifications of integrated circuits, also referred to as hardware Trojan and fault injection physical attacks, trusted manufacturing and smart contracts; split manufacturing; reverse engineering that is followed by hardware tampering and cloning, design overbuilding, hardware obfuscation; and other supply chain risks including consumer electronics counterfeits. This may also include outstanding papers on various topics related to hardware security: hardware security primitives (PUFs and TRNGs), trusted and secure IoT design, hardware Trojan detection, countermeasures against power analysis and side-channel attacks, efficient and reliable low power hardware security techniques, Blockchain and AI approaches for hardware-based security.

Dr. Fathi Amsaad
Dr. Ahmed Abdelgawad
Prof. Sean (Xiangdong) Che
Guest Editors

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