I recently learned that Accellera has formed an IP security working group. My first reaction was “Great, we really need that!”. My second reaction was “But I have so many questions.” Security in the systems world is still very much a topic in its infancy. I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t good work being done in both software and… Read More
Data Management for SoCs – Not Optional Anymore
Design Management (DM) encompasses business decisions, strategies and processes that enable product innovations. It is the foundation for both effective collaboration and gaining competitive advantage in the industry. This also applies in the high-tech space we are in, as having a sound underlying SoC data management for… Read More
Fuzzing on Automotive Security
The ECU. That was the service department prognosis on the root cause of thealways-on air bag safety light on my immaculate car. Ten years ago the cost for its replacement with after market part was at par with getting a new iPhone 8. Today, we could get four units for the same price and according to data from several research companies,… Read More
Unhackable Product Claims are a Fiasco Waiting to Happen
Those who think that that technology can be made ‘unhackable’, don’t comprehend the overall challenges and likely don’t understand what ‘hacked’ means.
Trust is the currency of security. We all want our technology to be dependable, easy to use, and secure. It is important to understand both the benefits… Read More
Webinar: Ensuring System-level Security based on a Hardware Root of Trust
A root of trust, particularly a hardware root of trust, has become a central principle in well-architected design for security. The idea is that higher layers in the stack, from drivers and OS up to applications and the network, must trust lower layers. What does it help it to build great security into a layer if it can be undermined… Read More
Timing Channel Attacks are Your Problem Too
You’ve heard about Meltdown and Spectre and you know they’re really bad security bugs (in different ways). If you’ve dug deeper, you know that these problems are related to the speculative execution common in modern processors, and if you dug deeper still you may have learned that underlying both problems are exploits called timing… Read More
Verification Importance in Academia
“Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence,” stated the famous computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. That notion rings true to the many college participants of the Hack@DAC competition offered during DAC 2018 in San Francisco. The goal of this competition is to develop tools and methods for identifying security… Read More
Drop-In Security for IoT Edge Devices
You’re excited about the business potential for your cool new baby monitor, geo-fenced kid’s watch, home security system or whatever breakthrough app you want to build. You want to focus on the capabilities of the system, connecting it to the cloud and your marketing rollout plan. Then someone asks whether your system is architected… Read More
Looking Ahead: What is Next for IoT
Over the past several years, the number of devices connected via Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially, and it is expected that number will only continue to grow. By 2020, 50 billion connected devices are predicted to exist, thanks to the many new smart devices that have become standard tools for people and businesses… Read More
Is This the Death Knell for PKI? I think so…
It was 1976 when distinguished scholars Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published the first practical method of establishing a shared secret-key over an authenticated communications channel without using a prior shared secret. The Diffie-Hellman methodology became known as Public Key Infrastructure or PKI.
That was… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography