The following is a list of topics to be covered:
- Physical Attacks and Tamper Resistance.
- Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures.
- Introduction to Lightweight Cryptography.
- Security of Smartcards and Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) Tags.
- Design of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and True Random Number -Generators (TRNGs).
- Personal integrity in the IoT era.
The aim of this course is to give doctoral students knowledge necessary to develop secure systems. In the era of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in which physical devices such as sensors and RFID tags are integrated with electronics to provide capabilities of sensing, computing and communication, assuring security of such systems becomes a great challenge. In order to tackle this problem, industry is making efforts across multiple layers involving cryptographic algorithms, protocols, secure integrated circuits, hardware architecture, etc. From the academic side, we have the responsibility to educate and prepare our students - the future engineers, for the security challenges of the IoT era. Specifically, in this course, we aim to make the students aware of potential hardware vulnerabilities and to give them the necessary knowledge and skills required for building trustworthy hardware.
Upon completion, students will be able to:
- Describe state-of-the-art hardware security techniques. Justify their targeted applications and limitations. Describe how security is assured in an exemplary application.
- Describe the threats to a system from the hardware perspective as well as available countermeasures. Apply the knowledge to select a suitable set of countermeasures for a specific threat scenario.
- Analyze and critically assess trade-offs between system performance, cost, and security. Exemplify some of the trade-offs that are available to designers of electronic and embedded systems.
- Explain the need for hardware security primitives. Justify pros and cons of different primitives and select a suitable one for a specific application.
- Apply the knowledge to design a small electronic or embedded system with enhanced security in a group project. Explain how the security is assured in the system.