Microelectronic technology trends pose challenges and opportunities for Hardware Security design, applications and threats. VLSI research has evolved over the last decades, solving design problems related to area, timing, power, testing, and others, but most recently, security and privacy have moved to the forefront. Driving applications have also advanced to smaller and more autonomous systems, culminating in the Internet of Things which requires rethinking of security and privacy requirements and solutions at both the thing and cloud level. Implantable medical devices in particular present unique design constraints and threat models. Variations in advanced CMOS technology and operating environment present challenges and opportunities related to security, illustrated in three recent research projects :
1) Hardware Trojans present a real vulnerability during untrusted design/manufacturing especially in random number generation where functional validation is difficult.
2) Variations in the data retention time of memory cells can be used as a static entropy source, also known as physical unclonable functions (PUF), however reliably extracting this entropy across temperature variation requires novel processing based on ranking and hashing functions.
3) Environmental variations that impact PUFs can be used for virtual proofs of physical reality, a powerful new concept and capability in hardware security. Finally, on-chip sensor networks to monitor behavior and variations can be used to detect vulnerabilities, however can introduce their own vulnerabilities if not secured across untrusted processes in multi-core processors. Many open problems remain in all of these areas, from specific application and implementation issues, to novel attacks and countermeasures.