Towards Secure Composition of Integrated Circuits and Electronic Systems: On the Role of EDA
This work tackles security challenges in integrated circuits and electronic systems for the EDA community, but it is incremental as it reviews prior art and discusses strategies without presenting new results.
The paper addresses the need for electronic design automation (EDA) to incorporate security considerations, such as secure by design and secure composition of hardware, to combat hardware-centric threats, highlighting gaps like effective compilation of security constraints and automated synthesis of countermeasures.
Modern electronic systems become evermore complex, yet remain modular, with integrated circuits (ICs) acting as versatile hardware components at their heart. Electronic design automation (EDA) for ICs has focused traditionally on power, performance, and area. However, given the rise of hardware-centric security threats, we believe that EDA must also adopt related notions like secure by design and secure composition of hardware. Despite various promising studies, we argue that some aspects still require more efforts, for example: effective means for compilation of assumptions and constraints for security schemes, all the way from the system level down to the "bare metal"; modeling, evaluation, and consideration of security-relevant metrics; or automated and holistic synthesis of various countermeasures, without inducing negative cross-effects. In this paper, we first introduce hardware security for the EDA community. Next we review prior (academic) art for EDA-driven security evaluation and implementation of countermeasures. We then discuss strategies and challenges for advancing research and development toward secure composition of circuits and systems.