Impact of Emerging Hardware on Security and Privacy

Abstract

The articles in this special issue focus on ongoing research efforts in the development, use, and evaluation of emerging hardware features and techniques to improve system security. We have seen the emergence of new hardware features to improve software security by limiting memory access within an address space, such as Intel's memory protection keys (MPKs) and extended page table (EPT) switching, among others. Researchers have also proposed hardware-assisted roots of trust using trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel's software guard extensions (SGXs), so some questions are what the utility is of such techniques and what limitations they still face. The papers in this special issue provide guidance in these areas, which can be helpful in examining future research directions and future applications of such techniques.