Why It’s So Difficult — And Costly — To Secure Chips


Rising concerns about the security of chips used in everything from cars to data centers are driving up the cost and complexity of electronic systems in a variety of ways, some obvious and others less so. Until very recently, semiconductor security was viewed more as a theoretical threat than a real one. Governments certainly worried about adversaries taking control of secure systems through... » read more

Importance Of Programmability In Next-Generation Security Appliances


Traditional methods of deploying network security through software-based firewalls do not scale because the latency and bandwidth requirements cannot be addressed. The flexibility and configurability of Xilinx adaptive devices combined with IP and tool offerings significantly improves security processing performance. This white paper explores multiple firewall architectures, which include so... » read more

Securing Connected Medical Devices For FDA Submissions


The benefits and challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) are especially evident in healthcare, thanks to increases in the volume and use of medical devices. Network-connected devices have greatly improved patient care by helping healthcare providers monitor vital signs, regulate medication dosages, improve diagnostics, and ultimately improve patient outcomes while lowering costs. This whi... » read more

Creating IoT Devices That Will Remain Secure


What’s secure today may not be secure in the future, and even if you include an IoT device with state-of-the-art security, it may be surrounded by less secure devices. Steve Hanna, distinguished engineer at Infineon, examines the impact of security on IoT adoption, why resilience across a system is the new target for secure designs, and how to minimize the impact of less secure devices. » read more

Zonal Architectures Play Key Role In Vehicle Security


The automotive ecosystem is starting to shift toward zonal architectures, making vehicle functionality less dependent on the underlying hardware and allowing more flexibility in what gets processed where. The impact of that shift is both broad and significant. For carmakers, it could lead to hardware consolidation and more options for failovers in case something goes wrong with any system in... » read more

AI/ML Workloads Need Extra Security


The need for security is pervading all electronic systems. But given the growth in data-center machine-learning computing, which deals with extremely valuable data, some companies are paying particular attention to handling that data securely. All of the usual data-center security solutions must be brought to bear, but extra effort is needed to ensure that models and data sets are protected ... » read more

A Deeper Look into RowHammer’s Sensitivities: Experimental Analysis of Real DRAM Chips and Implications on Future Attacks and Defenses


Abstract "RowHammer is a circuit-level DRAM vulnerability where repeatedly accessing (i.e., hammering) a DRAM row can cause bit flips in physically nearby rows. The RowHammer vulnerability worsens as DRAM cell size and cell-to-cell spacing shrink. Recent studies demonstrate that modern DRAM chips, including chips previously marketed as RowHammer-safe, are even more vulnerable to RowHammer than... » read more

Bandwidth Utilization Side-Channel On ML Inference Accelerators


Abstract—Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in practice. Data and memory address encryption has been recently proposed to defend against off-chip attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that bandwidth... » read more

Debugging Embedded Applications


Debugging embedded designs is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of observed and possible interactions between hardware and software continue to grow, and as more features are crammed into chips, packages, and systems. But there also appear to be some advances on this front, involving a mix of techniques, including hardware trace, scan chain-based debug, along with better simulation ... » read more

HECTOR-V: A Heterogeneous CPU Architecture for a Secure RISC-V Execution Environment


Summary "To ensure secure and trustworthy execution of applications, vendors frequently embed trusted execution environments into their systems. Here, applications are protected from adversaries, including a malicious operating system. TEEs are usually built by integrating protection mechanisms directly into the processor or by using dedicated external secure elements. However, both of these... » read more

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