Des Autom Embed Syst (2008) 12: 171–172DOI 10.1007/s10617-008-9029-8

Guest editorial for special issue on embeddedsystem security

Tilman Wolf · Sri Parameswaran

Published online: 6 August 2008© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

Embedded system security is an emerging area of research and development that addressesthe problem of security vulnerabilities in embedded systems. The wide deployment of em-bedded systems as part of our infrastructure and daily life makes this an important topic.From a technical point of view, providing security in embedded systems presents a inter-esting challenge because their implementation and deployment characteristic open novelavenues of attack. To provide security guarantees, suitable countermeasures and improvedsystem designs are being developed.

This special issue contains six articles that present an overview and recent research resultsrelated to embedded system security. The articles were selected from a number of papers thatwere presented at the Second Workshop on Embedded System Security (WESS’07), whichwas held on October 4, 2007 in conjunction with EMSOFT/ESWEEK 2007 in Salzburg,Austria. In addition, a tutorial article was added to provide an introduction to embeddedsystem security as well as an overview on related research. The combination of these articlesrepresents an interesting cross-section of topics in embedded system security research:

• The first article, “Embedded Systems Security—An Overview” is a brief summary ofembedded system security research written by the guest editors. It is intended as a tutorial-style introduction to provide the reader with context for the other papers in this specialissue. (This article was not part of the WESS’07 program.)

• The second article, “EM Alignment using Phase for Secure Embedded Systems,” illus-trates the vulnerabilities of embedded systems to side-channel attacks. A novel methodfor extracting key information from a PDA is presented.

T. Wolf (�)Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USAe-mail: wolf@ecs.umass.edu

S. ParameswaranDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australiae-mail: sridevan@cse.unsw.edu.au

172 T. Wolf, S. Parameswaran

• The third article, “Path Switching: A Technique to Tolerate Dual Rail Routing Imbal-ances,” shows a esign of a defense mechanism against power analysis attacks. Path switch-ing is proposed as an improvement to dual rail precharge circuits.

• The fourth article, “Non Deterministic Caches: A Simple and Effective Defense againstSide ChannelAttacks,” looks at cryptanalysis at the microprocessor level. To avoid thatkey information can be inferred by observing cache behavior, non-determinism in cacheline expiration is introduced.

• The fifth article, “Elliptic Curve Cryptography on Embedded Multicore Systems,” ad-dresses the problem of parallelizing cryptographic operations across multiple processorcores. Different scheduling strategies for achieving this parallelism are explored.

• The sixth article, “Automated Software Attack Recovery using Rollback and Huddle,”discusses recovery techniques for cases where attacks are detected. A mechanism fordynamically instrumenting critical code regions is proposed.

We hope that this special issue on embedded system security is interesting to our readership.