Paper 2012/575 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2012/575 ↗

Nanoelectronic Solutions for Hardware Security

Abstract

Information security has emerged as an important system and application metric. Classical security solutions use algorithmic mechanisms that address a small subset of emerging security requirements, often at high energy and performance overhead. Further, emerging side channel and physical attacks can compromise classical security solutions. Hardware-based security solutions overcome many of the limitations of classical security while consuming less energy and improving performance. Nanoelectronics-based hardware security preserves all of these advantages while enabling conceptually new security mechanisms and security applications. This paper highlights nanoelectronics based security capabilities and challenges. The paper describes nanoelectronics-based hardware security primitives for device identification, digital forensics, and tamper detection. These primitives can be developed using the unique characteristics of emerging nanoelectronic devices such as complex device and system models, bidirectional operation, and temporal drift of state variables. We also identify important desiderata and outstanding challenges in nanoelectronics-based security.