Security in Embedded Hardware

Lecturer:

Dr.-Ing. Stefan Wildermann

Scope/Credit:

V2 + Ü2 (combined 5 ECTS)

Lecture location and time:

Thursday, 10:15 – 11:45, Lecture hall H4
First lecture: 24. April 2025

Register via StudOn.

Lab location and time:

Tuesday, 14:15 – 15:45, Room 02.133-128 (Dr. Stefan Wildermann)

Wednesday, 14:15 – 15:45, Room 02.133-128 (Paul Krüger)

First lab: 29. April 2025

Material (slides, exercises, other files):

All important documents can be found on StudOn.

Goal:

The protection of embedded systems against attacks on stored data and implementations is becoming increasingly important, yet also more challenging due to growing connectivity. Protecting embedded systems against both well-established and sophisticated modern attack techniques is the focus of this lecture. It covers existing attack methods, possible countermeasures, and how to design secure embedded systems.

Course content:

  • Introduction and Motivation
  • Code Injection Attacks
    • What types of code injection attacks exist?
    • Countermeasures
  • Invasive Physical Attacks
    • Microprobing
    • Reverse Engineering
    • Differential Fault Analysis
    • Countermeasures
  • Hardware Security Primitives
    • Random Number Generators
    • Physically Unclonable Functions
    • Fuzzy Extractor
    • Application Areas of Hardware Security Primitives
  • Hardware Design Process and Intellectual Property (IP) Protection
    • Security and Trust Issues in the Hardware Design Process
    • IP Encryption
    • FPGA Bitstream Encryption
    • IP Watermarking
  • Non-Invasive Physical Attacks
    • Timing Attacks
    • Simple and Differential Power Analysis
    • Fault-Injection Attacks
    • Countermeasures
  • Software-Induced Side-Channel Attacks (Spectre, Rowhammer)

Resources:

  • Catherine H. Gebotys Security in Embedded Devices. Springer 2010.
  • Swarup Bhunia, Mark M. Tehranipoor Hardware Security: A Hands-on Learning Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2019.