Hardware Threat: The Challenge of Information Security

As the technology of network has been developing, the safety of network is concerned by more and more people. The technology of information security comes about as a new field. The impact of software viruses to information security has been felt by the entire computerized world, through loss of productivity and loss of system resources or data. But the research on hardware vulnerabilities looks far less than that on software attack. In fact, hardware is just as susceptible as software to "hacker attacks", through inclusion of malicious logic; and the consequences of such an attack could be disastrous! This paper discusses hardware threat from the view of information security. To identify the hardware attack, we design a system based on AL216 with hardware vulnerabilities. Through this example, it¿s testified that hardware vulnerabilities is feasible and terrible. Furthermore, hardware threat is very difficult to detect and brings about huge challenge to information security.