Securing Hardware for Designing Trustworthy Systems

System-on-Chip (SoC) is the brain behind computing and communication in a wide variety of embedded systems. Reusable hardware Intellectual Property (IP) based SoC design has emerged as a pervasive design practice in the industry to dramatically reduce SoC design and verification cost while meeting aggressive time-to-market constraints. Growing reliance on these pre-verified hardware IPs, often gathered from untrusted third-party vendors, severely affects the security and trustworthiness of computing platforms. It is crucial to evaluate the integrity and trustworthiness of third-party IPs for designing trustworthy systems. In this talk, I will introduce a wide variety of hardware security vulnerabilities, design-for-security solutions, and possible attacks and countermeasures. I will briefly describe how the complementary abilities of simulation-based validation, formal verification as well as side channel analysis can be effectively utilized for comprehensive SoC security and trust validation.