Secured hardware design - An overview

Security is a prime concern in the design of a wide variety of embedded systems and security processors. So the customer security devices such as smart cards and security processors are prone to attack and there are on going research to protect these devices from attackers who intend to extract key information from these devices. Also an active attacker can induce errors during computation and exploit the faulty result to extract the key information embedded in the processor. Due to the design time issues weakness in the design is often revealed in the manufactured chips. Also because the post-manufacture security evaluation is time consuming and expensive, these security issues have to be considered at the design phase. This paper outlines some of the hardware attacks and provides a general idea of the process of these attacks.