Hardware security as a discipline originated out of cryptographic engineering and involves

hardware design Processor design is a subfield of computer engineering and electronics engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware. The design process involves choosing an instruction set and a certain ex ...

access control In the fields of physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource, while access management describes the process. The act of ''accessing'' may mean consuming ...

secure multi-party computation Secure multi-party computation (also known as secure computation, multi-party computation (MPC) or privacy-preserving computation) is a subfield of cryptography with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their ...

, secure key storage, ensuring code authenticity, measures to ensure that the supply chain that built the product is secure among other things. A

hardware security module A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages secrets (most importantly digital keys), performs encryption and decryption functions for digital signatures, strong authentication and other cryptogra ...

(HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages

digital keys A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

for strong authentication and provides cryptoprocessing. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server. Some providers in this discipline consider that the key difference between hardware security and

software security Application security (short AppSec) includes all tasks that introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security ...

is that hardware security is implemented using "non- Turing-machine" logic (raw

combinatorial logic In automata theory, combinational logic (also referred to as time-independent logic or combinatorial logic) is a type of digital logic which is implemented by Boolean circuits, where the output is a pure function of the present input only. This i ...

or simple state machines). One approach, referred to as "hardsec", uses FPGAs to implement non-Turing-machine security controls as a way of combining the security of hardware with the flexibility of software.

Hardware backdoor Hardware backdoors are backdoors in hardware, such as code inside hardware or firmware of computer chips. The backdoors may be directly implemented as hardware Trojans in the integrated circuit. Hardware backdoors are intended to undermine s ...

s are backdoors in hardware. Conceptionally related, a hardware Trojan (HT) is a malicious modification of electronic system, particularly in the context of integrated circuit. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a physical entity that is embodied in a physical structure and is easy to evaluate but hard to predict. Further, an individual PUF device must be easy to make but practically impossible to duplicate, even given the exact manufacturing process that produced it. In this respect it is the hardware analog of a one-way function. The name "physical unclonable function" might be a little misleading as some PUFs are clonable, and most PUFs are noisy and therefore do not achieve the requirements for a function. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in

integrated circuits An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Transistor count, Large ...

and are typically used in applications with high security requirements. Many attacks on sensitive data and resources reported by organizations occur from within the organization itself.

References

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External links

*Hardsec: practical non-Turing-machine security for threat eliminatio
"Hardsec" concept outline
Computer hardware Computer security Cyberwarfare Product design

See also

References

External links