The diffusion of complex embedded systems poses several challenges related to the security of such systems. Adversaries can leverage unprotected communication to hijack cyber-physical systems, resulting in incorrect and potentially dangerous behaviours, or can exploit implementation-specific vulnerabilities arising from the observation of side channel information and/or the malicious fault injections to recover secret information. Untrustworthy third party software and hardware can create openings for such attacks. Effective countermeasures need to be designed that can be effectively applied even in resource-constrained systems, which are typically among those exposed to such implementation attacks.

Finally, the complexity on modern and future embedded and mobile systems leads to the need to depart from manual planning and deployment of security features. Thus, design automation tools will be needed to design and verify the security features of new hardware/software systems. Such tools need to take into account and leverage the modern tools employed for designing and developing systems at the hardware and software level, including High Level Synthesis tools and compilers, and allow the developer to consider security not in isolation, but as one of the possible design dimensions. For instance, the interactions of security measures with fault-tolerance measures need to be explored.

This special issue encourages the submission of research and review articles related to these topics.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Compiler and runtime support for security
• Cryptography in embedded and reconfigurable systems
• Design automation and verification of security
• Efficient cryptography through embedded multi/many core systems
• Fault attacks and countermeasures, including interactions with fault-tolerance measures applied in critical and mixed-critical embedded systems
• Hardware architecture and extensions for cryptography
• Hardware/software security techniques
• Hardware Trojans detection and prevention in low-cost computing devices suitable for use in embedded systems
• Reverse engineering as a tool for implementation attacks against cryptographic primitives
• Physical unclonable functions
• Reliability and privacy in embedded systems
• Security of cyberphysical systems
• Security of networks-on-chips and multicore architectures
• Side channel attacks and countermeasures for smart cards and industrial embedded systems
• Engineering and efficient implementation of postquantum cryptographic primitives