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Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 9, 2026
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Pre-silicon tools for hardening hardware against side-channel and fault injection attacks have become popular recently. However, the security of the system is still threatened by sophisticated physical attacks, which exploit the physical layer characteristics of the computing system beyond the integrated circuits (ICs) and, therefore, bypass the conventional countermeasures. Further, environmental conditions for the hardware can also impact side-channel leakage and fault vulnerability in unexpected ways that are challenging to model in pre-silicon. Thus, attacks cannot be addressed solely by conventional countermeasures at higher layers of the compute stack due to the lack of awareness about the events occurring at the physical layer during runtime. In this paper, we first discuss why the current pre-silicon security and verification tools might fail to achieve security against physical threats in the post-silicon phase. Afterward, we provide insights from the fields of power/signal integrity (PI/SI), and failure analysis (FA) to understand the fundamental issue with the failed current practices. We argue that hardware-based moving target defenses (MTDs) to randomize the physical fabric’s characteristics of the system can mitigate such unaccounted post-silicon threats. We show the effectiveness of such an approach by presenting the results of two case studies in which we perform powerful attacks, such as impedance analysis and laser voltage probing. Finally, we review the overhead of our proposed approach and show that the imposed overhead by MTD solutions can be addressed by making them active only when a threat is detected.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available March 18, 2026
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 17, 2026
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 3, 2025
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