Manufacturing integrated circuits (ICs) is a complex task and highly globalized with many dependencies that cannot be changed easily.
Consequently, it is challenging to invent hardware security primitives from the ground-up that protect against all known physical attacks at the same time. In addition, while making ICs in the most recent technology is increasingly more costly, their fundamental physical properties largely remained the same which kept the cost of breaking their security objectives mostly constant. Furthermore, even partial adoption of countermeasures is often hampered by a costly development and a long time-to-market.
Especially for low-volume products this is a significant problem. To support the overall reasoning, attacks from the non-/semi- and fully-invasive domain are discussed. This talk will then focus on the challenges ahead, both from a practitioner’s and academic point of view, to make future systems and their chips more secure and trustworthy.
Speaker Biography
Vincent Immler is an incoming assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University. Beforehand, he was a subject matter expert in cryptanalysis at the Central Office for Information Technology in the Security Sector, a German government agency serving the law enforcement and intelligence community. He is author of the 2018 Best Paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) which presented a novel anti-tamper envelope. Due to his contributions to this field, he is chairing the upcoming workshop on 'Anti-tamper protective systems' for NATO. His research mainly focuses on next-generation attacks and defenses in hardware security. However, he is interested in all aspects of security. In the past, Vincent also worked for Fraunhofer Institute AISEC, IBM R&D, and ESCRYPT Inc. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Technical University Munich and a BS/MS in IT-Security from Ruhr-University Bochum.
