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Vision and Goals
Today's societies critically depend on electronic systems. Past spectacular cyber-attacks have clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of existing systems and the need to prevent such attacks in the future. The majority of available cyber-defenses concentrate on protecting the software part of electronic systems or their communication interfaces. However, manufacturing technology advancements and the increasing hardware complexity provide a large number of challenges so that the focus of attackers has shifted towards the hardware level. In particular, we saw already evidence for powerful and successful hardware-level attacks that circumvent any software-level security mechanisms, including Rowhammer, Meltdown and Spectre.
These attacks happened on products built using state-of-the-art microelectronic technology, however, we are facing completely new security challenges due to the ongoing transition to radically new types of nano-electronic devices, such as memristors, spintronics, or carbon nanotubes. The use of such emerging nano-technologies is inevitable to continue the exponential improvement of integration density and address the key challenges related to energy efficiency, computing power and performance. Therefore, the entire industry, from foundries to circuit and system designers, are switching to these emerging nano-electronics alongside scaled CMOS technologies in heterogeneous integrated systems. These technologies come with a new set of properties and also facilitate the development of radically different computer architectures. The new technologies and architectures provide new opportunities for achieving security targets, but also raise questions about their vulnerabilities to new types of hardware-related attacks.
The main objective of the Priority Programme is to understand the implications of emerging nano-electronics to system security, and specifically
o to assess possible security threats and vulnerabilities stemming from novel nano-electronics. A central challenge here is to establish the connection between hardware blocks vulnerable to attacks and the consequences of the attacks at the system level;
o to develop innovative approaches for establishing and improving system security based on nano-electronics. Security requires hardware trust anchors, which are hard to design with current technologies. This programme will push the use of new technology features for secure trust anchors.
The Priority Programme will enforce strong cooperation between scientists working on lower and higher levels of abstraction. Such a collaborative approach will result in development of innovative solutions for omnipresent secure hardware trust anchors in future computing systems and infrastructures, including the internet of things. This programme will give security designers a new set of methods and solutions for winning the permanent race between attackers and defenders for the next decade.
Weitere Informationen:
https://www.dfg.de/foerderung/info_wissenschaft/info_wissenschaft_19_34/index.html