Hardware security and trust have become a pressing issue during the last two decades due to globalization of semiconductor supply chain ubiquitous network connection computing devices. Computing hardware is now an attractive attack surface for launching powerful cross-layer attacks, allowing attackers infer secret information, hijack control flow, compromise system root-of-trust, steal intellec...

Not long ago, it was thought that only software applications and general purpose digital systems i.e. computers were prone to various types of attacks against their security. The underlying hardware, hardware implementations of these software applications, embedded systems, and hardware devices were considered to be secure and out of reach of these attacks. However, during the previous few year...

We give an outline of the specification and provable security features of the QUAD stream cipher proposed at Eurocrypt 2006 [5]. The cipher relies on the iteration of a multivariate system of quadratic equations over a finite field, typically GF(2) or a small extension. In the binary case, the security of the keystream generation can be related, in the concrete security model, to the conjecture...