If you want to check out the video first, it is below: When I finished this video, I definitely felt like I did not do justice to the field of semiconductor security. The textbooks were miles thick and a video can only be so long. People have been asking me about merchandise. I am not really a merch guy, but
If you want to check out the video first, it is below: When I finished this video, I definitely felt like I did not do justice to the field of semiconductor security. The textbooks were miles thick and a video can only be so long. People have been asking me about merchandise. I am not really a merch guy, but here's a shirt that I have been wearing and I like it. Modern chips own your life. For instance, take the A15 SOC that is sitting inside your iPhone. Inside that chip are multiple security assets of high corporate value: encryption keys, developer keys, DRM keys, and so on. Furthermore, imagine how much of your life's business is conducted through your mobile phone. For instance, my phone has my biometric information, my bank access information, passwords to all my services, and so on. Software security protections are frequently implemented with the tenet that "trust starts in silicon". But a house cannot be built on soft sand. Likewise, a secure system cannot be architectured on top of compromised hardware. In this video, I want to talk about the daunting problem of maintaining security in today's modern semiconductors. Why Compromise Hardware? Why compromise hardware? An attacker can have a variety of goals. And defenders have to consider all of them. They might want to outright disable or destroy the system, usually at a specified time in the future. These include kill switches, backdoors, or control circuitry. Or they might be looking to just change the chip's behavior. For instance, pirates look to compromise cable TV cards so that they can get access to cable TV for free. iPhone jailbreaks might also go under this category as well. Or they might want to leak or gain access to sensitive information stored on the device - like the encryption keys. Or they might be seeking to steal IP from the chip itself. Integrated circuit counterfeit and piracy is a real thing and can cost companies millions of dollars. Furthermore, the stolen IP can be…