Hardware security is a discipline originated from the cryptographic engineering and involves hardware design,

access control In physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the action of deciding whether a subject should be granted or denied access to an object (for example, a place or a resource). 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), and performs encryption and decryption functions for digital signatures, strong authentication and other crypt ...

(HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys 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 A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

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 ...

is that hardware security is implemented using "non- Turing-machine" logic (raw combinatorial logic 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 backdoors are backdoors in hardware. Conceptionally related, a hardware Trojan (HT) is a malicious modification of

electronic system Electronic may refer to: *Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductors *Electronics (magazine), ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal *Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electron ...

, particularly in the context of

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

. 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 In computer science, a one-way function is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here, "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, s ...

. 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 Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-orie ...

. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in

integrated circuits An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

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

External links

*Hardsec: practical non-Turing-machine security for threat elimination {{Computer science Computer hardware Cyberwarfare Product design Cybersecurity engineering

See also

References

External links