Dear Colleagues,

Hardware-intrinsic security takes advantage of the intrinsic behavior of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) to protect the hardware/software applications against new cyberattacks. Research in hardware intrinsic security and assurance (HISA) has recently gained momentum as it provides a unique layer of trust and authentication for emerging smart and life-critical applications. These applications include smart buildings and spaces, intelligent transportation and connected autonomous systems, advanced metering infrastructure to improve reliability, safety, sustainability, and power delivery in smart cities, implantable medical devices that diagnose, monitor, and treat a wide range of medical conditions to improve our lifestyles, smart sensors and embedded hardware for connected IoT devices. The recently exposed chip vulnerabilities, i.e. Spectre and Meltdown, are striking evidence that hardware intrinsic security is essential to enable trust in the manufactured hardware and chip design. For that, semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and embedded devices are designed, fabricated, and assembled at varies locations across the globe, involving multiple parties, making them venerable to new cyber and physical system attacks. The rapid devolvement of such critical security challenges in the modern supply chain security challenge urges the need for a non-conventional and robust countermeasure against such modern cyberattacks.

This special issue of MDPI: Electronics focused on hardware intrinsic security and its applications for electronics systems, particularly in constructing imminent computing systems against these emerging attacks without significantly degrading system performance. This includes new hardware security issues that have grown significantly over the past decade with an array of new physical and embedded systems attacks and countermeasures like malicious modifications of integrated circuits, also referred to as hardware Trojan and fault injection physical attacks, trusted manufacturing and smart contracts; split manufacturing; reverse engineering that is followed by hardware tampering and cloning, design overbuilding, hardware obfuscation; and other supply chain risks including consumer electronics counterfeits. This may also include outstanding papers on various topics related to hardware security: hardware security primitives (PUFs and TRNGs), trusted and secure IoT design, hardware Trojan detection, countermeasures against power analysis and side-channel attacks, efficient and reliable low power hardware security techniques, Blockchain and AI approaches for hardware-based security.

Dr. Fathi Amsaad
Dr. Ahmed Abdelgawad
Prof. Sean (Xiangdong) Che
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Hardware Trojan attacks and detection techniques
• Hardware-based security primitives (PUFs, RNGs)
• Security, privacy, and trust protocols
• Side-channel attacks and protection
• Metrics, policies, and standards related to hardware security
• Security of biomedical systems, e-health, and medicine
• Secure system-on-chip (SoC) architecture
• Hardware IP trust (watermarking, metering, trust verification)
• Trusted manufacturing including split manufacturing and 3D ICs
• Security analysis and protection of Internet of Things (IoT)
• Secure and efficient implementation of crypto algorithms
• Reverse engineering and hardware obfuscation
• Supply chain risks mitigation including counterfeit detection & avoidance
• Hardware tampering attacks and protection
• Hardware techniques that ensure software and/or system security