Attendees from government, industry, and academia participated in the inaugural 2018 Physical Attacks and Inspection on Electronics (PAINE) workshop.  PAINE Workshop was co-located with the 2018 Design Automation Conference DAC in San Francisco California. The program was chaired by Dr. Asadi who is an assistant professor at the University of Florida FICS Research. “The workshop went extremely well. We had innovative and informative talks from our domestic and international speakers and we received very good feedback from participants.” Said the program chair.

This workshop is the first step in starting the conversation on such topics in the US for the first time and will include all forms of physical attacks and countermeasures, including, but not limited to, reverse engineering, physical tampering, micro/nanoprobing, and physical access at the chip, PCB, and system level.  Seven papers were presented and seven invited talks on newest topics of physical inspection and attacks on electronics. We also had a great panel discussion on “the crossroad between physical inspection and hardware security.”  Speakers shared their recent findings on reverse engineering, trust verification, and protection against such physical attacks.

With the recent advancement of failure analysis and microscopy tools, it is easier for an adversary to attack electronic chips and systems physically within a short time and bypass the security primitives implemented by software. PAINE looks into these types of attacks and how we as a community of hardware security and microscopy experts can provide protection against such attacks.

Bookmark your calendars for this momentous event which is scheduled to occur tentatively in April 2019. Another incentive to join in on this prodigious event is that papers accepted for the workshop will be published in the HaSS journal special issue on hardware reverse engineering and obfuscation.