Engineering Secure Devices

PART I

FUNDAMENTALS

I’ve known brilliant embedded system engineers in the industry who have a passion for the lowest-level hardware development, who know every script in their toolchains by heart, and who can squeeze the last bit of performance out of a microcontroller’s firmware. However, when it comes to the security of embedded systems, I regularly discover a lack of knowledge in two fundamental areas.

First, many aren’t familiar with the essential methods and organizational measures necessary to establish a secure development process. Second, even if they know some cryptographic algorithms by name, they may not fully understand their properties, parameters, and limits as well as the reasoning behind them. With that in mind, the first part ...