Towards Secure Composition of Integrated Circuits and Electronic Systems: On the Role of EDA
Johann Knechtel1, Elif Bilge Kavun2, Francesco Regazzoni3, Annelie Heuser4, Anupam Chattopadhyay5, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay6, Soumyajit Dey7, Yunsi Fei8, Yaacov Belenky9, Itamar Levi10, Tim Güneysu11, Patrick Schaumont12 and Ilia Polian13
1NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE
johann@nyu.edu
2University of Sheffield, UK;
e.kavun@sheffield.ac.uk
3ALaRI, University of Lugano, Switzerland;
regazzoni@alari.ch
4Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France;
annelie.heuser@irisa.fr
5Department of Astrophysics - University of Vienna Vienna, Austria
anupam@ntu.edu.sg
6NTU, Singapore;
debdeep@cse.iitkgp.ac.in
7IIT Kharagpur, India
soumya@cse.iitkgp.ac.in
8NEU, Boston, USA;
yfei@ece.neu.edu
9Intel, Israel;
yaacov.belenky@intel.com
10BIU, Ramat Gan, Israel
itamar.levi@biu.ac.il
11RUB & DFKI, Bochum & Bremen, Germany;
tim.gueneysu@rub.de
12VT, Blacksburg, USA;
schaum@vt.edu
13University of Stuttgart, Germany
ilia.polian@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
ABSTRACT
Modern electronic systems become evermore complex, yet remain modular, with integrated circuits (ICs) acting as versatile hardware components at their heart. Electronic design automation (EDA) for ICs has focused traditionally on power, performance, and area. However, given the rise of hardwarecentric security threats, we believe that EDA must also adopt related notions like secure by design and secure composition of hardware. Despite various promising studies, we argue that some aspects still require more efforts, for example: effective means for compilation of assumptions and constraints for security schemes, all the way from the system level down to the “bare metal” modeling, evaluation, and consideration of securityrelevant metrics; or automated and holistic synthesis of various countermeasures, without inducing negative cross-effects.
In this paper, we first introduce hardware security for the EDA community. Next we review prior (academic) art for EDA-driven security evaluation and implementation of countermeasures. We then discuss strategies and challenges for advancing research and development toward secure composition of circuits and systems.
