In this course, we will study security and trust from the hardware perspective. Upon completing the course, students will understand the vulnerabilities in current digital system design flow and the physical attacks to these systems. They will learn that security starts from hardware design and be familiar with the tools and skills to build secure and trusted hardware.
This course is part of the Cybersecurity Specialization
Hardware Security
Offered By
About this Course
4.0
303 ratings
Skills you will gain
Montgomery Modular MultiplicationSide-Channel AttackHardware DesignCryptographic Hardware
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Week
12 hours to complete
Digital System Design: Basics and Vulnerabilities
To learn hardware security, we first need to learn how hardware is designed. This week's lectures give an overview of the basics on digital logic design, which is a semester-long course for freshmen and sophomores in most schools. By no means we can cover all the materials. What we provide here is the minimal set that you need to understand about digital design for you to move on to learn hardware security.
7 videos (Total 63 min), 2 readings, 1 quiz
7 videos
Introduction 5m
Digital System Specification10m
Digital System Implementation9m
Function Simplification and Don't Care Conditions10m
Sequential System Specification8m
Sequential System Implementation7m
Vulnerabilities in Digital Logic Design12m
2 readings
Syllabus10m
Week 1 Overview10m
1 practice exercise
Quiz14m
Week
22 hours to complete
Design Intellectual Property Protection
As a hardware designer or a company, you want to protect your design intellectual property (IP) from being misused (by users, competitors, silicon foundry, etc). We will cover how you can build such protection during the design process which can be used as an evidence to support law enforcement protection. You are expected to understand the basic digital logic design knowledge covered in week 1. We will use several NP-hard problems as examples to illustrate the concepts of IP protection. These problems (graph vertex coloring problem and graph partitioning problem) will be introduced in the lecture and you do not need to know the concept of NP-complete.
6 videos (Total 78 min), 1 reading, 1 quiz
6 videos
Watermarking Basics8m
Watermarking Examples12m
Good Watermarks15m
Fingerprinting17m
Hardware Metering13m
1 reading
Week 2 Overview10m
1 practice exercise
Quiz22m
Week
32 hours to complete
Physical Attacks and Modular Exponentiation
This week you will learn the fundamentals about physical attacks: what are physical attacks, who are the attackers, what are their motivations, how can they attack your system (from hardware), what kind of skills/tools/equipment they should need to break your system, etc. You will also see what are the available countermeasures. You will learn how system security level and tamper resistance level are defined and some general guidelines on how to make your system secure by design.
In the second part, you will learn a useful mathematical operation called modular exponentiation. It is widely used in modern cryptography but it is very computational expensive. You will see how security vulnerability might be introduced during the implementation of this operation and thus make the mathematically sound cryptographic primitives breakable. This will also be important for you to learn side channel attack next week.
7 videos (Total 80 min), 1 reading, 1 quiz
7 videos
Physical Attacks and Countermeasures 13m
Building Secure Systems 10m
Modular Exponentiation (ME) Basics 6m
ME in Cryptography8m
ME Implementation and Vulnerability14m
Montgomery Reduction11m
1 reading
Week 3 Overview10m
1 practice exercise
Quiz20m
Week
42 hours to complete
Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures
This week, we focus on side channel attacks (SCA). We will study in-depth the following SCAs: cache attacks, power analysis, timing attacks, scan chain attacks. We will also learn the available countermeasures from software, hardware, and algorithm design.
5 videos (Total 86 min), 1 reading, 1 quiz
5 videos
Memory Vulnerabilities and Cache Attacks19m
Power Analysis16m
More Attacks and Countermeasures13m
Modified Modular Exponentiation22m
1 reading
Week 4 Overview10m
1 practice exercise
Quiz30m
4.0
59 Reviews20%
got a tangible career benefit from this course
25%
got a pay increase or promotion
Top Reviews
It was a very nice course. Lots of exposure was given to mathematical ways of analyzing threat.
I found this course very informative, it expanded to me the landscape of cyber security.
Instructor
Gang Qu
Associate ProfessorElectrical and Computer Engineering
About University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 37,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes three Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 47 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The institution has a $1.8 billion operating budget, secures $500 million annually in external research funding and recently completed a $1 billion fundraising campaign.
About the Cybersecurity Specialization
The Cybersecurity Specialization covers the fundamental concepts underlying the construction of secure systems, from the hardware to the software to the human-computer interface, with the use of cryptography to secure interactions. These concepts are illustrated with examples drawn from modern practice, and augmented with hands-on exercises involving relevant tools and techniques. Successful participants will develop a way of thinking that is security-oriented, better understanding how to think about adversaries and how to build systems that defend against them.
Frequently Asked Questions
When will I have access to the lectures and assignments?
Once you enroll for a Certificate, you’ll have access to all videos, quizzes, and programming assignments (if applicable). Peer review assignments can only be submitted and reviewed once your session has begun. If you choose to explore the course without purchasing, you may not be able to access certain assignments.
What will I get if I subscribe to this Specialization?
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free.
What is the refund policy?
Is financial aid available?
More questions? Visit the Learner Help Center.
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