Hardware Security

About this course: In this course, we will study security and trust from the hardware perspective. Upon completing the course, students will understand the vulnerabilities in current digital system design flow and the physical attacks to these systems. They will learn that security starts from hardware design and be familiar with the tools and skills to build secure and trusted hardware.

Created by:  University of Maryland, College Park

• Taught by:  Gang Qu, Associate Professor

  Electrical and Computer Engineering

Basic Info Course 4 of 5 in the Cybersecurity Specialization Language English How To Pass Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. User Ratings 4.0 stars Average User Rating 4.0See what learners said Coursework

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University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 37,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes three Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 47 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The institution has a $1.8 billion operating budget, secures $500 million annually in external research funding and recently completed a $1 billion fundraising campaign.

Syllabus


WEEK 1


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.


7 videos, 2 readings expand

1. Reading: Syllabus
2. Reading: Week 1 Overview
3. Video: Introduction
4. Video: Digital System Specification
5. Video: Digital System Implementation
6. Video: Function Simplification and Don't Care Conditions
7. Video: Sequential System Specification
8. Video: Sequential System Implementation
9. Video: Vulnerabilities in Digital Logic Design

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 2


Design Intellectual Property Protection



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.


6 videos, 1 reading expand

1. Reading: Week 2 Overview
2. Video: Introduction to IP Protection
3. Video: Watermarking Basics
4. Video: Watermarking Examples
5. Video: Good Watermarks
6. Video: Fingerprinting
7. Video: Hardware Metering

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 3


Physical Attacks and Modular Exponentiation



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.


7 videos, 1 reading expand

1. Reading: Week 3 Overview
2. Video: Physical Attacks (PA) Basics
3. Video: Physical Attacks and Countermeasures
4. Video: Building Secure Systems
5. Video: Modular Exponentiation (ME) Basics
6. Video: ME in Cryptography
7. Video: ME Implementation and Vulnerability
8. Video: Montgomery Reduction

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 4


Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures
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.


5 videos, 1 reading expand

1. Reading: Week 4 Overview
2. Video: Introduction to Side Channel Attacks
3. Video: Memory Vulnerabilities and Cache Attacks
4. Video: Power Analysis
5. Video: Attacks and Countermeasures
6. Video: Modified Modular Exponentiation

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 5


Hardware Trojan Detection and Trusted IC 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.


5 videos, 1 reading expand

1. Reading: Week 5 Overview
2. Video: Hardware Trojan (HT) and Trusted IC
3. Video: Hardware Trojan Taxonomy
4. Video: Hardware Trojan Detection Overview
5. Video: Hardware Trojan Detection Methods
6. Video: Trusted IC Design with HT Prevention

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 6


Good Practice and Emerging Technologies



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.


6 videos, 1 reading expand

1. Reading: Week 6 Overview
2. Video: FPGA Implementation of Crypto
3. Video: Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures in FPGA Systems
4. Video: Role of Hardware in Security and Trust
5. Video: Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) Basics
6. Video: RO PUF: Reliability
7. Video: Trust Platform Module and Other Good Practices

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 7


Final Exam

Graded: Final Exam