Chip Backdoors: Assessing the Threat


In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek made an explosive claim: Chinese spies had implanted backdoors in motherboards used by some high-profile customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense. All of those customers issued strongly worded denials. Most reports of hardware backdoors have ended up in exchanges like these. There are allegations and counter-allegations about specifics. But as hardw... » read more

Cybersecurity Is A Journey


Hardware Is the Foundation of Your Security Posture Due to the inability to ‘patch’ silicon, failure to identify and remediate hardware vulnerabilities early comes with catastrophic consequences. However, most of the focus and investments in cybersecurity have historically been on device software and its administrators, not on securing the underlying hardware. Hardware Vulnerabilitie... » read more

Secure Physical Design Roadmap Enabling End-To-End Trustworthy IC Design Flow


The FICS Research Institute (University of Florida) has published a new research paper titled "Secure Physical Design." This is the first and most comprehensive research work done in this area that requires significant attention from academia, industry, and government for ensuring trust in electronic design automation flow," said lead author Sukanta Dey. Abstract "An integrated circuit is s... » read more

Publicly Available Dataset for PCB X-Ray Inspection (FICS- University of Florida)


Researchers from the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) at the University of Florida published this technical paper titled "FICS PCB X-ray: A dataset for automated printed circuit board inter-layers inspection." Abstract "Advancements in computer vision and machine learning breakthroughs over the years have paved the way for automated X-ray inspection (AXI) of printed circuit bo... » read more

RETBLEED: New Spectre-BTI Attack (ETH Zurich)


New Spectre-BTI attack that "leaks arbitrary kernel memory." It's detailed in this research paper titled “RETBLEED: Arbitrary Speculative Code Execution with Return Instructions” from researchers at ETH Zürich. Mitigations are available. Abstract "Modern operating systems rely on software defenses against hardware attacks. These defenses are, however, as good as the assumptions they m... » read more

Security Risks Widen With Commercial Chiplets


The commercialization of chiplets is expected to increase the number and breadth of attack surfaces in electronic systems, making it harder to keep track of all the hardened IP jammed into a package and to verify its authenticity and robustness against hackers. Until now this has been largely a non-issue, because the only companies using chiplets today — AMD, Intel, and Marvell — interna... » read more

Advancing The Maturity Of Your Hardware Security Program


Where are you today on the Hardware Security Maturity Model? Hardware security is a journey. LEVEL 1: Foundational Define security requirements and validate hardware security features are working with functional verification. LEVEL 2: Basic Introduce threat models and security verification requirements while also enabling hardware protection mechanisms. Ad hoc security verification beg... » read more

Hardware Dynamic IFT Mechanism That Scales to Complex Open-Source RISC-V Processors


New technical paper titled "CellIFT: Leveraging Cells for Scalable and Precise Dynamic Information Flow Tracking in Hardware Designs" by researchers at ETH Zurich and Intel.  Paper to be presented at USENIX Security 2022 (August 10-12, 2022) in Boston, MA, USA. Partial Abstract "We introduce CELLIFT, a new design point in the space of dynamic IFT [Information flow tracking] for hardware. C... » read more

Chips Can Boost Malware Immunity


Security is becoming an increasingly important design element, fueled by increasingly sophisticated attacks, the growing use of technology in safety-critical applications, and the rising value of data nearly everywhere. Hackers can unlock automobiles, phones, and smart locks by exploiting system design soft spots. They even can hack some mobile phones through always-on circuits when they are... » read more

U. Of Florida: Protecting Chip-Design IP From Reverse-Engineering


New research paper titled "Hardening Circuit-Design IP Against Reverse-Engineering Attacks" from University of Florida. "Design-hiding techniques are a central piece of academic and industrial efforts to protect electronic circuits from being reverse-engineered. However, these techniques have lacked a principled foundation to guide their design and security evaluation, leading to a long line... » read more

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