The desire for digital sovereignty, recent global semiconductor shortages and geopolitical interests are driving forces behind various worldwide initiatives to strengthen semiconductor technology and manufacturing on a national and regional basis. In this context, hardware security will play a vital role since hardware is at the heart of all computing systems, and insecure hardware will put critical systems and consequently, our society at risk.
However, in recent years, we are observing the discovery of a growing number of hardware design and implementation vulnerabilities that could be exploited by unprivileged software, leading to potential exposure of sensitive data or compromise of whole computing systems. This new attack paradigm casts a long shadow on decades of research on system security and disrupts the traditional threat models that have mainly focused on software-only vulnerabilities and often assume that the underlying hardware is behaving correctly and is trustworthy. Unfortunately, existing solutions are often ad-hoc, limited, inefficient, and address only specific problems.
The main goal of this workshop is to bring together international researchers and experts from academia, industry, and government to exchange knowledge and explore new ideas and research directions for tackling the challenges related but not limited to security-by-design for hardware, scalable assurance methodologies for hardware security and resilience, and security-aware electronic design automation that pave the way for establishing sustainable security for computing platforms.