Hardware Injection and Hardware Security

Prerequisites

• Computer architecture or embedded-systems background.
• Basic knowledge of cryptography and system security.
• Willingness to follow hardware lab safety rules.

Learning Outcomes

• Explain hardware threat models and physical attack surfaces.
• Understand fault injection, power side channels, and timing side channels.
• Evaluate risks in debug interfaces, boot chains, and key storage.
• Design reproducible and safe hardware experiments.
• Propose hardware security defenses and validation plans.

Course Format

• Two meetings per week: one for core concepts and one for labs, paper discussion, or project review.
• The course proceeds over 16 weeks, each with a checkable assignment, lab, or project milestone.
• Reproducibility is required: code, configuration, data, lab logs, and reports must be reviewable by staff or peers.

Weekly Plan

Assessment

Course Project

Projects may audit hardware interfaces, extract firmware, measure side channels, evaluate defenses, or reproduce a paper. Safety notes and reproducible artifacts are required.

Policies

• AI tools are allowed, but generated code, lab notes, and design suggestions must be reviewed by the student and disclosed in the report.
• Students may not submit code, proofs, configuration, or experimental results they cannot explain; each member must defend their own design, tests, and tradeoffs.
• Late work affects iteration grades, but the course values reproducible, auditable, and maintainable results over last-minute accumulation.