Guest Editors’ Introduction: Competing to Secure SoCs

The recent outbreak of microarchitectural attacks is a reminder that our trust in hardware and security architectures is not always justified. These attacks illustrate that ever-increasing system complexity is fertile ground for exploitable security vulnerabilities. An exploited vulnerability in the field can lead to a system failure, generate a side channel to remotely access sensitive cryptographic keys, or gain privileged access that compromises the whole computing platform.