Variability: For headache and profit

The paper discusses hardware security. The author mention that there were best times and worst times for hardware security. Numerous factors facilitate, both qualitatively and quantitatively an essentially unlimited potential for attacks. Factors include an increasingly popular and profitable horizontal semiconductor business model, sharply reduced controllability and observability ultracheap silicon, expensive testing, ultra-large-scale integration, manufacturing variability aging, thermal and operational sensitivity, crosstalk, and many other physical properties of deep submicron technologies. Hardware Trojan horses, physical unclonable functions, cryptography were some of the issues mentioned and discussed in this paper.