In the emerging field of hardware-intrinsic security, researchers are beginning to propose methods to secure and univocally identify a system. In a globally connected world, secure and trusted hardware is just as important as secure and trusted software.

For many years, no one was interested in hardware security; no one thought hardware was vulnerable to Trojan horses and supplanting techniques. Recent research and proofs of concept have demonstrated that it is possible to compromise a system without regard to its operating system by exploiting vulnerabilities in the hardware (as has occurred for years with software).

This book is a collection of research papers on hardware security. Each of its six parts covers a different hardware security topic.

Part 1 is about physically unclonable functions (PUFs). A PUF is a function that, with a stimulus, generates a response that depends on an intrinsic random physical feature of the device. In this way, it is possible to identify the system. This part of the book consists of four papers, including a very interesting report on the state of the art in PUFs and a look ahead to future PUFs.

The second part of the book contains two papers that discuss hardware-based cryptography. They both examine leakage attacks on hardware cryptographic modules, exposing the fact that it is possible to extract sensible information from the device by generating an abstraction that models a side channel, such as power consumption or electromagnetic radiation. The papers present an overview of the problem and show solutions, such as using encryption for PUFs.

The third part of the book contains an interesting paper about Trojan horses in hardware. The idea is the same as that of a software Trojan, and works by adding some extra logic to a circuit to cause an undesirable behavior. In this way, the manufacturer of the circuit can gain access to protected parts of the memory or make the system work in supervisor modes without authentication. The paper presents techniques for avoiding this problem.

Part 4 looks inside the problem of policy enforcement based on hardware. This section talks about problems such as licensed content distribution, the use of hardware fingerprints to avoid copies, and other intellectual property violations.

An interesting part of the book is Part 5, which covers contactless token security. This is a commonly used device for payments and access control, and it is a technology that will be used in many more aspects of life in the near future. The security of such devices is critical, and much work is currently underway in this area. The papers in this section present the problem and propose a solution using an example in public-key cryptography.

The last part of the book presents five papers on architectures and applications. The papers are a compendium of techniques applied to real problems, such as trusted satellite navigation and reliable remote healthcare.

This book will prove to be very interesting for professionals in the hardware security field. It covers almost every aspect of this area, with excellent papers written by experts. Unlike many Springer publications, however, it is not an introductory book.