Nikhil Rangarajan - The Next Era in Hardware Security: A Perspective on Emerging Technologies for Secure Electronics

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With technology scaling reaching nanometer range and the ever-increasing demands for new application domains, emerging technologies, different from conventional CMOS VLSI, are seriously being investigated to complement it. Emerging technologies based on novel materials and new computing paradigms represent an alternate paradigm in the quest for secure and robust electronics. Conventional logic and memory systems have traditionally employed security as an afterthought, if at all, at the circuit or system design stage. However, emerging technologies and novel materials can offer a unique opportunity to incorporate security-centric design practices at the device conception stage itself. By promoting device-circuit co-design with security as a prime metric (along with the traditional power, performance, and area considerations), emerging technologies may indeed reinvent the way we think about hardware security.

This book provides well-curated insights for the potential of emerging devices, materials, and the resulting novel architectures to tackle various challenges of hardware security, ranging from intellectual property protection to data security. Each chapter describes a particular set of properties, which are promising to advance the state of the art for the implementation of security schemes. Broad and informative reviews of seminal emerging technologies and their related security schemes are included, along with detailed case studies to highlight the most important aspects of emerging secure electronics. This book aims to educate the reader on the various approaches and practices employed for forging emerging technologies into viable security schemes. The tutorial-style writing and organization aids the reader through the whole process, starting from (1) a pedagogical connecting the dots approach for mapping the needs and requirements of particular security primitives with the properties offered by emerging technologies, over to (2) reviews of relevant concepts, and (3) detailed case studies, which can inspire readers to apply their own knowledge of emerging technologies and security, to not only learn but possibly devise their own schemes.

Mehdi Tahoori

This book describes recent research at the confluence of hardware security and emerging technologies and complements it thoroughly with fundamentals of both domains. This book focuses on the unique properties of emerging technologies pertinent to the needs of hardware security and discusses methodologies to leverage those properties in order to build secure computing and storage systems. It presents these security-centric device characteristics in a structured and logical manner, along with recent research results, which serve well for both educational purposes and to motivate further interest and research in this field.

More specifically, this book is a comprehensive compilation of hardware security concepts borne out of the unique characteristics of emerging logic and memory devices, and related architectures. The primary focus is on mapping emerging technology-specific properties like multi-functionality, runtime polymorphism, intrinsic entropy, nonlinearity, ease of heterogeneous integration, tamper-resilience, and side-channel resistance to the corresponding security primitives that they help realize, namely static and dynamic camouflaging, true random number generation, physical unclonable functions, secure heterogeneous and large-scale systems, tamper-proof hardware, and side-channel-resilient circuits, respectively. We discuss several technologies offering the desired properties, including but not limited to spintronics switches, memristors, silicon nanowire transistors, and optoelectronic devices, for such security primitives and schemes, while also providing detailed case studies for each of the outlined security application. Overall, the book aims to provide a holistic perspective of how the promising properties found in emerging technologies, which are not readily afforded by traditional CMOS devices and systems, can help advance the field of hardware security.