What Makes A Chip Tamper-Proof?


The cyber world is the next major battlefield, and attackers are busily looking for ways to disrupt critical infrastructure. There is widespread proof this is happening. “Twenty-six percent of the U.S. power grid was found to be hosting Trojans," said Haydn Povey, IAR Systems' general manager of embedded security solutions. "In a cyber-warfare situation, that's the first thing that would b... » read more

PUF, The Magic IoT Defender


How would you feel if you put hours of effort and your ingenuity into designing a product, only to find cheaper copycats on the market? And what if, over time, those copycats failed and somehow eroded your company’s brand reputation? It happens more often than it should, especially as hackers up their game in sophistication and consumers get attracted to lower cost options. So that’s why... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — health An injectable biosensor may someday help measure signs of influenza. DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and digital health startup Profusa announced a study that uses Profusa’s Lumee Oxygen Platform to find ways to identify flu outbreaks, biological attacks and pandemics as much as three weeks earlier than curre... » read more

IP Security In FPGAs


Quinn Jacobson, strategic architect at Achronix, talks about security in FPGAs, including how to prevent reverse engineering of IP, how to make sure the design is authentic, and how to limit access to IP in transit and in the chip. » read more

New Approaches To Security


Different approaches are emerging to identify suspicious behavior and shut down potential breaches before they have a chance to do serious damage. This is becoming particularly important in markets where safety is an issue, and in AI and edge devices where the rapid movement of data is essential. These methods are a significant departure from the traditional way of securing devices through l... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 26


Firefly microstructures in LED light bulbs Pennsylvania State University researchers wanted to improve the energy efficiency of commercial light-emitting diode light bulbs to save even more energy. They found the answer in the lantern surface of fireflies. "LED lightbulbs play a key role in clean energy," said Stuart (Shizhuo) Yin, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State. "Overall... » read more

Blockchain May Be Overkill for Most IIoT Security


Blockchain crops up in many of the pitches for security software aimed at the industrial IoT. However, IIoT project owners, chipmakers and OEMs should stick with security options that address the low-level, device- and data-centered security of the IIoT itself, rather than the effort to promote blockchain as a security option as well as an audit tool. Only about 6% of Industrial IoT (IIoT) p... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 14


Mentor's Jin Hou and Joe Hupcey III explain two fundamental characteristics of formal analysis that simplify things for the formal algorithm and provide better wall clock run time and memory usage performance. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from five presentations all discussing what's behind AI's movement to edge devices, the vast amount of investment going into the area, and whe... » read more

Who’s Responsible For Security?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security issues and how to fix them with Mark Schaeffer, senior product marketing manager for secure solutions at Renesas Electronics; Haydn Povey, CTO of Secure Thingz; Marc Canel, vice president of security systems and technologies at [getentity id="22186" comment="Arm"]; Richard Hayton, CTO of Trustonic; Anders Holmberg, director of corporate dev... » read more

Imperfect Silicon, Near-Perfect Security


Some chipmakers, under pressure to add security to rapidly growing numbers of IoT devices, have rediscovered a "fingerprinting" technique used primarily as an anti-counterfeiting measure. [getkc id="227" kc_name="Physically unclonable functions"] (PUFs) are used to assign a unique identification number based on inconsistencies in the speed with which current causes a series of logic gates to... » read more

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