Evolution and future directions in embedded security

Embedded systems have become—with billions of instances—omnipresent in our everyday lives. In addition to resource efficiency and reliability, security is one of their key aspects. Bank cards, access systems, electronic passports, medical equipment, transportation systems, or IoT devices, they all carry sensitive information or need encrypted communication. In this paper, we discuss the history of embedded security. We also summarize the basic problems that are being addressed, such as side-channel attacks, random number generators, and physical unclonable functions. A special chapter is dedicated to the Euromicro conference on Digital System Design, where we summarize the research presented in the track Architectures and Hardware for Security Applications (AHSA) over the past decade. Finally, we provide an outlook on the future directions in security of embedded devices.