Let's conclude the course with some discussion on the roles that hardware play in security and trust. Assume that you have some valuables, gold, diamonds, jewelry or whatever. How to protect it? Most of us will think, put it in a safe and lock it. In our discussion, hardware is the safe. So, let's say, you have a digital secret you want to protect. You can develop a solid crypto-algorithm with secure protocol to protect it. And, you can write a, a solid, a well-protected software to implement this crypto-algorithm or secure protocol. But, eventually you need hardware. You need computers to exe, execute these software products. You need developers to do the communication. So, this is the first role of hardware plays in security and trust. It is an enabler, without hardware we cannot do all these computation of the, and the communication. And also, people know that customized hardware always has better performance than software implementation. So that brings us to the second role of hardware in security and trust, it becomes an enhancer. Normally, enhance the performance of the system in terms of speech, energy consumption, et cetera. And we have also seen the case of security and trust with additional hardware inside the systems. The system can add more security to the system. More recently, we have seen more advance or more involvemen, involvement of hardware in security. We present it by this thing called Trusted Platform Module. And also some, a lot of this Vormetric uh,co-processors. What they do there is they are trying to build a first line of defense. If you cannot pass the authentication check in TPM, if you cannot pass the authentication check by the biometric co-processor, you cannot access the CPU. And however, we have seen that it is important to have hardware, but if you don't design your hardware properly. Let's come back to this safe. The safe is solid, however, you leave the key combination of the safe right on top of the safe. Then this safe is not safe anymore. This is the same as when you design a hardware, you leave a lot of back doors. And through the course, we have seen a lot of vulnerabilities from hardware side. People can use side-channel attacks. People can use physical attacks. Trying to steal the information inside the hardware, trying to attack the physical system. This brings us to this, this question. Is hardware become the weakest link in security or not? Unfortunately, if you don't design your hardware properly, if you don't think about security and the trust to the design and optimization of your hardware, it will become the weakest link for security. So what will be the challenges for hardware design? In my opinion, there are three things we have to consider. First, as a hardware designer, you want to secure the design. You want to protect your intellectual property. And we have discussed about the attacks the, the overbuilding, counterfeiting, IP theft and IP misuse. And we have already provide count countermeasures or techniques to prevent this, like digital watermark, digital fingerprint, hardware metering, all these things of authentication. And also you have to make sure that the hardware you deliver to the customer, they are trusted. This is what we call the trusted integrated circuits. There shouldn't be any backdoors. There shouldn't be any hardware Trojan horse. And the second challenge of hardware design here is eventually, the hardware is going to do some computation. It's going to have some data. You want to make sure the data will be secured, and against side channel attacks, against any physical attacks to any kind of memory or And finally, you have to be active, trying to provide hardware security primitives. Try to enhance or improve the system's overall security performance. And we have talked about the TPM, and they are also secure co-processors, which speed up the competition of security. And we have seen PUF. We have seen random number generators. This x can stand for t, for true random number, true number, number, random number generators, while p for pseudo-random number generators. And also, you have to keep, always keep on looking at the new devices, and the new technologies, and whether it will bring any vulnerabilities to the hardware design. And, or, whether it can provide new features for hardware design. I hope that in the, in this six weeks, you have learned something, which might be useful, and it can be, you can use it to protect your design, to make your design more secure. And finally, I will say, thank you
