Hardware is the bedrock on which all computing systems are built. Recently developed hardware ideas for enhancing software security from both academia and industry hold significant promise to improve software security. At the same time, recent hardware attacks on current commodity hardware have shown hardware to be a weak foundation for building secure systems. As we enter post‐Moore’s‐law era, there are significant questions surrounding what would make security techniques more practical.

IEEE MICRO seeks articles on hardware‐enhanced security and privacy. Papers can focus on a range of topics, including but not limited to:

  • microarchitectural side‐channel attacks and defenses, and fault attacks and defenses;
  • architectures for key management, attestation, patching, and updating firmware and software;
  • architectures for isolation and compartmentalization/tamper‐proof execution;
  • architectures for metadata‐based approaches to security and privacy;
  • architectures for introspection, debugging, and root cause analysis;
  • microarchitectural techniques for malware detection and adversarial resistance;
  • secure storage, e.g., using emerging nonvolatile memories;
  • metrics and evaluation methodologies for secure architectures including languages/frameworks for early design stage security exploration;
  • approaches to post‐Moore’s‐law security (secure‐accelerator designs will ideally be in the context of an end‐to‐end application);
  • microarchitectural design patterns for security;
  • social processes for creating security in large‐scale designs;
  • secure architectures for domains such as voting machines, implantable medicaldevices, automotives, Internet‐of‐Things, and data centers.

Submissions due date: March 4, 2019 

Revised papers due date: May 4, 2019

Final versions due date: May 24, 2019

Initial notifications: April 4, 2019

Final notifications: May 10, 2019

Publication date: July/August 2019

Submission guidelines

See the Write for Us page and the general author guidelines for more information. Submit files electronically through ScholarOne Manuscripts, selecting this special issue option.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors Simha Sethumadhavan (simha@columbia.edu) and Mohit Tiwari (tiwari@austin.utexas.edu) or the Editor‐in‐Chief Lizy John (ljohn@ece.utexas.edu).

IEEE Micro Special Issue for Security