Hardware Security

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/hardware-security

Introduction

# Course Review: Hardware Security on Coursera As we venture deeper into the digital age, security and trust become paramount to the robustness of our systems. The **Hardware Security** course offered on Coursera provides a comprehensive exploration of security from the hardware perspective, helping students understand vulnerabilities in digital systems and how to secure them effectively. This review aims to detail the course's contents, share insights, and recommend it to potential learners. ### Overview The course revolves around the critical notion that security begins at the hardware design stage. By the end of the course, participants will not only grasp the various vulnerabilities in digital system design but will also learn about physical attacks and the necessary tools to create secure hardware. This course deftly combines theoretical knowledge with practical skills essential for anyone interested in hardware security. ### Course Structure 1. **Digital System Design: Basics and Vulnerabilities** - The introductory module lays the groundwork by providing fundamental knowledge about digital logic design. While it simplifies a typically extensive subject, it equips students with the minimum necessary understanding required for hardware security. 2. **Design Intellectual Property Protection** - This module focuses on protecting design intellectual property (IP) during the design process. Through various NP-hard problems like graph vertex coloring and graph partitioning, learners are exposed to real-world scenarios on how to safeguard their designs from misuse. 3. **Physical Attacks and Modular Exponentiation** - Here, students explore the landscape of physical attacks, gaining insights into who the attackers are and the motivations behind their actions. The discussion on modular exponentiation, a key operation in cryptography, highlights the vulnerabilities that can arise during its implementation, setting the stage for understanding side channel attacks. 4. **Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures** - This module encompasses in-depth studies of numerous side channel attacks (SCA), including cache attacks, power analysis, and timing attacks. Importantly, students also learn about countermeasures, providing them with a well-rounded view of how to approach security. 5. **Hardware Trojan Detection and Trusted IC Design** - The concept of hardware Trojans—malicious modifications or additions to circuits—is thoroughly examined. Learners will appreciate the taxonomies of Trojans, and explore detection techniques and prevention methods to build trusted integrated circuits. 6. **Good Practice and Emerging Technologies** - In the concluding module, the course highlights positive developments in hardware security, such as trust platform modules (TPM) and physical unclonable functions (PUF). This forward-looking perspective is crucial for anyone eager to stay ahead in the evolving landscape of hardware security. 7. **Final Exam** - The course concludes with an assessment that tests the knowledge gained throughout the duration, ensuring students can apply what they've learned. ### Recommendations The **Hardware Security** course is highly recommended for: - **Students in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering**: Those seeking to deepen their understanding of hardware vulnerabilities and security practices will find this course invaluable. - **Industry Professionals**: Engineers and designers tasked with developing secure hardware systems will benefit from the insights on threats and countermeasures. - **Security Enthusiasts**: Individuals passionate about cybersecurity and eager to explore the hardware angle will discover enriching information throughout this course. ### Conclusion Overall, the **Hardware Security** course on Coursera is a robust educational opportunity for anyone intrigued by the intersection of hardware and security. The structure is well-organized, with content that builds progressively while providing practical knowledge that can be directly applied in the field. If you aim to understand hardware vulnerabilities and learn how to design secure systems effectively, this course is undoubtedly worth your time. Secure your spot and take a step toward becoming a well-versed professional in the rapidly evolving domain of hardware security.

Syllabus

Digital System Design: Basics and Vulnerabilities

To learn hardware security, we first need to learn how hardware is designed. This week's lectures give an overview of the basics on digital logic design, which is a semester-long course for freshmen and sophomores in most schools. By no means we can cover all the materials. What we provide here is the minimal set that you need to understand about digital design for you to move on to learn hardware security.

As a hardware designer or a company, you want to protect your design intellectual property (IP) from being misused (by users, competitors, silicon foundry, etc). We will cover how you can build such protection during the design process which can be used as an evidence to support law enforcement protection. You are expected to understand the basic digital logic design knowledge covered in week 1. We will use several NP-hard problems as examples to illustrate the concepts of IP protection. These problems (graph vertex coloring problem and graph partitioning problem) will be introduced in the lecture and you do not need to know the concept of NP-complete.

This week you will learn the fundamentals about physical attacks: what are physical attacks, who are the attackers, what are their motivations, how can they attack your system (from hardware), what kind of skills/tools/equipment they should need to break your system, etc. You will also see what are the available countermeasures. You will learn how system security level and tamper resistance level are defined and some general guidelines on how to make your system secure by design. In the second part, you will learn a useful mathematical operation called modular exponentiation. It is widely used in modern cryptography but it is very computational expensive. You will see how security vulnerability might be introduced during the implementation of this operation and thus make the mathematically sound cryptographic primitives breakable. This will also be important for you to learn side channel attack next week.

This week, we focus on side channel attacks (SCA). We will study in-depth the following SCAs: cache attacks, power analysis, timing attacks, scan chain attacks. We will also learn the available countermeasures from software, hardware, and algorithm design.

This week we study hardware Trojan and trusted integrated circuit (IC) design. Hardware Trojans are additions or modifications of the circuit with malicious purposes. It has become one of the most dangerous and challenging threats for trusted ID design. We will give hardware Trojan taxonomies based on different criteria, explain how hardware Trojan work, and then talk about some of the existing approaches to detect them. We define trusted IC as circuit that does exactly what it is asked for, no less and no malicious more. We will illustrate this concept through the design space analysis and we will discuss several practical hardware Trojan prevention methods that can facilitate trust IC design.

This is the last week and we will cover some positive things on hardware security. We start with trust platform module (TPM), followed by physical unclonable functin (PUF), and FPGA-based system design. We conclude with a short discussion on the roles that hardware play in security and trust.