IC Industry Waking Up To Security


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling Many people pay lip service to the concept of security in Internet of Things devices, software, and networks. That oversight is beginning to fade away, however, as companies begin digging into one of the broadest and most complex problems in the IoT age. Unlike other technology issues, which have been solved in increments, security is all-inclusive. While ... » read more

Unexpected Security Holes


Security is emerging as one of the top challenges in semiconductor design across a variety of markets, with the number of security holes growing by orders of magnitude in sectors that have never dealt with these kinds of design constraints before. While security has been a topic of conversation for years in mobile phones and data centers, commercial and industrial equipment is being connecte... » read more

Oh, The Hypocrisy


It's almost impossible to find anyone hasn’t heard about the privacy case chest-thumping going on between Apple and the FBI, as well as a few other federal entities. And by now the interview with Tim Cook and David Muir is quite public, as well. So how come, all of a sudden, Apple, Microsoft (although Bill Gates did come out on the government side) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and countless ot... » read more

Back Doors Are Everywhere


By Ernest Worthman & Ed Sperling Back doors have been a part of chip design since the beginning. One of the first open references was in the 1983 movie "War Games," which features a young computer whiz who uses one to hack into a computer that controls the United States' nuclear arsenal. In reality, modern back doors predate Hollywood's discovery by about 20 years, starting in 1965 wi... » read more

What Is Cyberwarfare?


Cyberwarfare is emerging as the most sophisticated battleground of the 21st century. In fact, the military in all major countries make it a priority. Collectively they are spending tens of billions of dollars on education and building a knowledgebase of how attacks can be perpetrated and what defenses are needed. The entire effort is based on technology, both legacy and new, starting on the ... » read more

Executive Insight: Paul Kocher


Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Rambus' Cryptography Research Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the state of security today and how it will be affected as more devices are connected. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The number of vulnerabilities is increasing. Are we making progress? Kocher: If your metric for progress is the... » read more

Reliability Adds Risk Over Time


Being able to connect devices to other devices has a long list of benefits, many of them related to the digitization of the analog or physical world. That includes all the benefits of being able to quantify, process and analyze information to to relay it in real time all over the globe. This is what's at the heart of the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything revolution. It's also at leas... » read more

Scare Of The Month: The Breach At Juniper


Details are sketchy, but it was definitely a back door hack of Juniper. That almost always points in the direction of an inside job. So far, no one quite knows how exactly the hack was accomplished. But what scares me is that, supposedly, this code has been in the system for three years already. Drilling down a bit, it turns out there was more than one back door. One of them allowed ... » read more

The New Face of Formal


Semiconductor engineering sat down to discuss the recent growth in adoption of formal technologies and tools with Lawrence Loh, product engineering group director at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"], Praveen Tiwari, senior manager R&D, verification group at [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"], Harry Foster, chief scientist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"], Normando... » read more

The Challenge Of Updating Cars


News stories about automotive hacking are becoming more common, and so is the concern about how to curb this problem. Security has become a new layer of system design complexity, and it's being taken increasingly seriously in a market that until very recently largely ignored it. That attitude is changing rapidly though, particularly with the advent of autonomous and connected vehicles. Secu... » read more

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