Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust

(3-0-0-3)

CMPE Degree: This course is Selected Elective for the CMPE degree.

EE Degree: This course is Selected Elective for the EE degree.

Lab Hours: 0 supervised lab hours and 0 unsupervised lab hours.

Technical Interest Groups / Course Categories: Threads / ECE Electives

Course Coordinator: Vincent J Mooney

Prerequisites: ECE 3058 [min D, with concurrency] or ECE 3170 [min D, with concurrency]

Catalog Description

Fundamental concepts, foundation, and methodologies for the design of trustworthy circuits including protection of the hardware platform against tampering. Physical cloning of cryptographic VLSI circuits.

Textbook(s)

Course Outcomes

Develop the ability to both identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in hardware and low-level software including firmware.

Develop analysis and evaluation skills with respect to entropy and randomness in electronics hardware. 

Develop and apply important cryptographic techniques including modern authentication and encryption. 

Evaluate and investigate VLSI semiconductor specific malicious attacks including hardware Trojans.

Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs)

N/A

Topic List

  1. Advanced Authentication
    1. Message Authentication Codes (MAC)
    2. Entropy & randomness
    3. Multi-party authentication
  2. Modern Cryptography
    1. Data privacy
    2. Indistinguishability
    3. Encryption modes
    4. Secret sharing
    5. AES, ECC and SHA
  3. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs)
    1. PUF construction classes
    2. PUF entropy sources
    3. PUF metrics & attacks including machine learning
    4. Practical considerations including current status
  4. Hardware and Software Vulnerabilities
    1. Common weakness enumerations
    2. Secure boot
    3. Timing Attacks
    4. Countermeasures in hardware
  5. Hardware Attacks
    1. Reverse engineering
    2. Advanced Hardware Trojans (HTs)