Assessing the security of a hardware design sometimes seems like a combination of the guy looking under a streetlight for his car keys, because that’s where the light is (We have this tool, let’s see what problems it can find) and a whack-a-mole response to the latest publicized vulnerabilities (Cache timing side channels? What… Read More
Preventing a Product Security Crisis
The video conference company Zoom has skyrocketed to new heights and plummeted to new lows in the past few weeks. It is one of the handful of communications applications that is perfectly suited to a world beset by quarantine actions, yet has fallen far from grace because of poor security, privacy, and transparency. Governments,… Read More
Breker Tips a Hat to Formal Graphs in PSS Security Verification
It might seem paradoxical that simulation (or equivalent dynamic methods) might be one of the best ways to run security checks. Checking security is a problem where you need to find rare corners that a hacker might exploit. In dynamic verification, no matter how much we test we know we’re not going to cover all corners, so how can it… Read More
Private Datacenter Safer than the Cloud? Dangerously Wrong.
The irony around this topic in the middle of the coronavirus scare – when more of us are working remotely through the cloud – is not lost on me. Nevertheless, ingrained beliefs move slowly so it’s still worth shedding further light. There is a tribal wisdom among chip designers that what we do demands much higher security than any other… Read More
Security in I/O Interconnects
I got a chance to chat with Richard Solomon at Synopsys recently about a very real threat for all of us and what Synopsys is doing about it. No, the topic isn’t the Coronavirus, it’s one that has been around a lot longer and will continue to be a very real threat – data and interconnect security.
First, a bit about Richard. He is the technical… Read More
There is No Easy Fix to AI Privacy Problems
Artificial intelligence – more specifically, the machine learning (ML) subset of AI – has a number of privacy problems.
Not only does ML require vast amounts of data for the training process, but the derived system is also provided with access to even greater volumes of data as part of the inference processing while in operation. … Read More
An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight
Security has been a domain blessed with an abundance of methods to improve in various ways, not so much in methods to measure the effectiveness of those improvements. With the best will in the world, absent an agreed security measurement, all those improvement techniques still add up to “trust me, our baby monitor camera is really… Read More
Cryptocurrency Fraud Reached $4.3 Billion in 2019
Cryptocurrency fraud is aggressively on the rise and topped over $4 billion last year, according to the security tracking company Chainalysis.
This is especially shocking to those who thought they had found an incredible investment in the cryptocurrency world, yet were swindled out of everything. As part of these cryptocurrency… Read More
Banks are Developing Digital Currencies and Opening Themselves to Cyber Risk!
Cybersecurity will be hard pressed to take on the new challenges of bank managed digital currencies.
Banks are developing their own digital currencies. The introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) is the beginning of an interesting trend that will change the cybersecurity dynamic for banking as it opens up an … Read More
Digital Retaliation of Iran – Top 6 Likely Cyber Attacks
The United States and allies’ national cyber response may soon be tested with the latest escalating conflict in the middle east. The U.S. conducted an airstrike that killed a revered Iranian general while in Iraq. This was in retaliation to a number of attacks against U.S. personnel and most recently the U.S. embassy in… Read More


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