California’s IoT Law Is A Good Start, But More Needs To Be Done


Passed by former California governor Jerry Brown, cybersecurity law SB-327 went into effect on Jan. 1. This proactive legislation requires manufacturers to equip IoT devices with “reasonable” security features to prevent unauthorized access, modification and data leaks. Specifically, SB-327 requires manufacturers to implement a unique preprogrammed (default) password for each device. Additi... » read more

Security Risks In The Supply Chain


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security in the supply chain with Warren Savage, research scientist in the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland; Neeraj Paliwal, vice president and general manager of Rambus Security; Luis Ancajas, marketing director for IoT security software solutions at Micron; Doug Suerich, product evangelist at ... » read more

Online Template Attacks


Authors: Lejla Batina, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Łukasz Chmielewski, Riscure, Delft, The Netherlands Louiza Papachristodoulou, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Peter Schwabe, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Michael Tunstall, Rambus Cryptography Research Division, San Francisco, USA. Template attacks are a special... » read more

Bricked IoT Devices Are Casualties Of Lax Semiconductor Security


Earlier this summer, a new strain of destructive malware known as Silex began to spread and effectively brick unprotected IoT devices. Although victims of Silex theoretically can resurrect their IoT devices by manually reinstalling factory firmware, most remain wary of an installation process that is often time consuming and complicated. Moreover, many victims assume their device has suffered a... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 18


Lam Research's David Haynes finds that taking advances made at 300mm and applying them via upgrades to 200mm equipment is a cost appropriate strategy to quickly improve yield and add capacity. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at which of this year's many data breaches hit corporate wallets the hardest and how the cost of privacy noncompliance is expected to rise with California's CCPA and st... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Rambus finalized its acquisition of the silicon IP, secure protocols and provisioning business from Verimatrix, formerly Inside Secure, for $45 million at closing, and up to an additional $20 million, subject to certain revenue targets in 2020. RISC-V SiFive unveiled two new product families. The SiFive Apex processor cores target mission-critical processors with Size, Weight, and Power (SW... » read more

Taking A Closer Look At Side Channel Attacks


In last month’s Semiconductor Engineering article, we explored the basics of side channel attacks (SCAs). As we discussed, all cryptographic algorithms are subject to side channel attacks, with vulnerabilities extending across all platforms and form factors. In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the two primary categories of side channel attacks: simple power analysis (SPA) and ... » read more

A Trillion Security Risks


An explosion in IoT devices has significantly raised the security threat level for hardware and software, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Sometime over the next decade the number of connected devices is expected to hit the 1 trillion mark. Expecting all of them to be secure is impossible, particularly as the attack surface widens and the attack vectors become more sophisticated... » read more

Analysis, Modeling And Characterization Of Multi-Protocol High-Speed Serial Links


Improved analysis, modeling, characterization and correlation methods of multi-protocol high-speed transceivers that utilize T-coil to enhance the transmitter and receiver bandwidth, transmitter FIR filters and receiver CTLE and DFE equalizers is presented. The key circuit blocks are measured and modeled using IBIS-AMI models and the overall system performance including the eye diagrams, BER cu... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 27


Arm's Ben Fletcher digs into what's needed to make wireless 3D integration a reality from a tool to automate the design and optimization process for inductors used in wireless 3D-ICs to exploring how the data can be encoded in the transceiver to reduce power consumption. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Eli Singerman of Intel explains the importance of platform security and why firmware... » read more

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