Introduction to the Special Issue on the Digital Threats of Hardware Security

Digital threats to computing and network security continue their relentless advance, with malware growing in sophistication and frequently targeting the lower levels of the computing stack. Recently, these threats have evolved and started to target hardware vulnerabilities. Such attacks are hard to detect at the higher abstraction levels and even harder to mitigate given the challenges of changing the hardware infrastructure. To be effective, defensive measures must also consider the physical effects of computing at lower levels of the hardware stack