Guest Editorial Special Issue on Secure and Trustworthy Computing

There is a growing concern regarding the trustworthiness and reliability of the hardware underlying all information systems on which modern society is reliant. Trustworthy and reliable semiconductor supply chain, hardware components, and platforms are essential to all critical infrastructures including financial, healthcare, transportation, and energy. Traditionally, the information systems underlying all critical infrastructures were being protected—specifically the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of the information was being ensured—using security protocols implemented in software running on hardware platforms that were assumed to be trustworthy and reliable. However, this assumption is no longer true; an increasing number of attacks are being reported on the hardware root of trust [https://isis.poly.edu/esc/2014/index.html]. Since 2008, NYU has been organizing the annual Embedded Security Challenge (ESC) to demonstrate the ease and feasibility of hardware-based attacks on information systems. As part of this annual event, ESC2014 challenged the hardware security and emerging technologies communities to investigate hardware-based attacks and hardware-based security primitives rooted in emerging technologies according to the tutorial papers on this topic [Rajendran et al. 2012, 2015]. ESC 2014 had three phases [https://isis.poly.edu/esc/2014/index.html]. In phase 1, 14 teams submitted a 2-page proposal that described an emerging technology, the structure and operation of the security primitives that exploited the unique characteristics of the chosen emerging technology, the threat model that the security primitives target, the security metrics used to evaluate the security primitives and applications of the developed security primitives. Ten promising proposals were down-selected for Phase 2 of ESC 2014. In this phase, participants developed and evaluated their emerging technology-based security primitives. In the ESC 2014 finals held at NYU in November 2014, as part of the annual NYU Cyber Security Awareness Week, the ten finalists demonstrated and presented their security primitives and submitted a final report. Examples of security primitives included, but were not limited to, cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators, public-key and private-key cryptography, one-way hash functions, and physical unclonable functions. Emerging technologies that were considered include: graphene transistors, atomic switches, memristors, Mott field effect transistor, spin FET, all-spin-logic, spin-wave devices, orthogonal spin-transfer random access memory, magneto-resistive random access memory, spintronic devices, nanomagnets, nano-electromechanical switches and phase-change memory. The finalists included Case Western Reserve University, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Central Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of